The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Tolkien was stranded now, without publisher or agent, his two books—representing more than thirty years of work—moldering on the shelf. One hope remained. In late November, Rayner Unwin had sent him a letter, stating that he still believed in the value of Tolkien’s vast creation and asking to see The Silmarillion. Tolkien responded the following June, in a message rife with kindness (he had always liked Rayner), lament, and remorse. He had “behaved badly” by not writing earlier; “disaster” had struck, in the form of summer examinations; he had suffered a “terrible bout of fibrositis and neuritis,” he had been “too downhearted” to take further steps toward publishing. But now he had “modified” his views. The unspoken truth, of course, was that time was fleeting and he feared his work would come to naught. “Better something than nothing!” he exclaimed. Yes, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion belonged together, but he would rejoice to see any portion of the work in print: “Can anything be done … to unlock gates I slammed myself?”

  Rayner threw open the gates eight days later, replying that his firm remained eager to publish The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s very own eucatastrophe had arrived. Letters and meetings ensued, notable for the marked change in his account of his writings: now he found The Lord of the Rings “a great (though not flawless) work” and, contradicting his earlier dire predictions to Milton Waldman and Stanley Unwin, assured Rayner that a “larger number of people than might be supposed” loved books of this type and length and might be expected to buy it. Newly confident, he busied himself by fixing chronological and narrative inconsistencies in the text. During this time, he also visited his friends George and Moira Sayer in Malvern. There he recorded, after exorcising the tape recorder (the first he had seen) by reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, portions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He volunteered to help Sayer in his garden, which led to this telling reminiscence from his host: Tolkien “chose an area of about two square yards, part flower border and part lawn and cultivated it perfectly: the border meticulously weeded and the soil made level and exceedingly fine; the grass cut with scissors closely and evenly. It took him quite a long time to do the job, but it was beautifully done. He was in all things a perfectionist.”

  More good news followed. On September 19, 1953, Rayner and his wife traveled to Oxford to collect the revised typescript; in early November, Rayner telegrammed his father, now in Asia, to say that the book might lose the firm a thousand pounds but that it was a work of genius; Stanley replied, “If you believe it is a work of genius, then you may lose a thousand pounds.” On November 10, Allen & Unwin officially tendered an offer to publish. Tolkien immediately passed the great tidings on to Lewis, who replied by describing an “inward chuckle of deep content.” The news meant the prospect of “having the book to read and re-read”; it also meant that “so much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away quite spurlos into the past, is now, in a sort made permanent.” The eucatastrophe embraced not only Tolkien but his friends, his generation, and the world. Oblivion had been averted; is it surprising that Lewis closed the letter “God bless you”?

  Changes at the Kilns

  At the same time, Lewis was watching his own world slip away. Mrs. Moore, now seventy-eight and spending her days in an immobilized fury, confined to bed by arthritis and senility, was removed on April 29, 1950, to the aptly named Restholme, a private nursing home on the Woodstock Road where Warnie had lodged recently while recovering from his increasingly frequent binges. She reacted to her new environs with expected fury, lambasting the nurses and demanding, as Warnie reports in his diary, “to know how soon she will be able to escape from this hell on earth in which she is imprisoned.” She would never escape; Restholme would remain her home until death. Lewis rejoiced and despaired over the change, telling Arthur that “it will be an enormous liberation for me” yet fretting over the cost, five hundred pounds a year, so that “I hardly know how I feel—relief, pity, hope, terror, & bewilderment have me in a whirl. I have the jitters!”

  The jitters soon fled. He visited Mrs. Moore every day, a “grievous” burden, but otherwise he reveled in his new freedom, as if released from a binding spell. How could he not? The Kilns, formerly his prison, had become his manor, free of a scolding woman and yelping dogs. He urged Arthur to come to Oxford, chirped about his own improved health now that he was at liberty to swim regularly in the local river, and assured his friend that his home was “now a house less horrible to stay in than I know it was before.” During the summer, he also invited George Sayer (“We cd. read the whole Aeneid together”) and Cecil Harwood to visit. His letters lost the plaintive note that had crept in as his home life had collapsed around him. When Mrs. Moore died on January 12, 1951, nearly nine months had passed since she had entered Restholme, and Lewis’s freedom had come to term. He barely recorded her death in his voluminous correspondence, apart from a terse remark to Arthur (“Minto died a fortnight ago. Please pray for her soul”) followed immediately by details of his long-delayed, now-impending sojourn in Ireland. He would breathe again the air of his childhood. He would, in a sense, begin his life again. Warnie was far more outspoken in his own diary, seething over Mrs. Moore’s role in “the rape of J’s life” and of Lewis’s “crushing misfortune” in meeting her.

  Even Lewis’s failure to win an Oxford professorship did not dampen his spirits. On February 8, less than a month after Mrs. Moore’s death, the university elected, as it did every five years, a chair of poetry. The two leading candidates were Lewis and another Irish-born poet-novelist, C. Day-Lewis. The latter, a former Communist and future poet laureate (as well as future father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis), was a lyrical nature poet as well as the author, under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, of a series of popular mystery novels. Many of C. S. Lewis’s closest friends, including Warnie, Barfield, Havard, Bennett, and David Cecil, gathered at the Royal Oxford hotel to await returns, which proved as close as the two candidate’s names, C. Day defeating C.S. by 21 votes out of 367. Warnie blamed the loss on atheists, Communists, and voters with “Slav and Balkan names,” and it is probably true that Lewis’s Christian bully-pulpit image did him in; one elector told Dyson he planned to vote against Lewis because of Screwtape.

  The loser, however, seemed indifferent to the outcome: life without Mrs. Moore shone too brightly for a momentary eclipse to matter. Nor did it upset him when, later that year, he felt obliged to turn down a CBE from Churchill’s Conservative government, fearing that it would encourage “knaves” and “fools” to read his Christian writings as right-wing screeds. The proposed honor gratified, but a Christian must recognize the ephemerality of earthly fame, and, anyway, more acute pleasures—especially that of wielding the pen—beckoned. The Narnia series flowed on, book after book, with scarcely a hitch; Magdalen had granted him a year’s sabbatical to work on OHEL; and to cap this litany of joys, Joy Davidman had reentered his life.

  Lewis had responded with gusto to Joy’s first letter. He always welcomed aggressive intellectuals, especially those who showed wit and bite—Barfield had been the greatest example—and Joy, although female, looked as if she might qualify. She, for her part, treasured his ripostes. “Just got a letter from Lewis in the mail,” she told Chad Walsh. “Lord, he knocked my props out from under me unerringly; one shot to a pigeon. I haven’t a scrap of my case left. And, what’s more, I’ve seldom enjoyed anything more … what I feel is a craftsman’s joy at the sight of a superior performance.” The correspondence flourished. For Joy, it offered not only friendly exchange with a famous Christian writer but escape from her collapsing marriage to Bill Gresham, who continued to drink and womanize as his career advanced (his 1946 novel of carnival hucksterism and psychic scams, Nightmare Alley, had become a 1947 Hollywood film with Tyrone Power in the lead). Joy no longer loved her husband; the romance evaporated, she told a friend, “as a result of something [Bill] did”—the unnamed transgression was an affair—“when I wa
s seriously ill.” This behavior was characteristic of Gresham, whose rakish charm was small compensation for a roving eye and a quick fist that threatened both wife and offspring.

  In August 1952, Joy sailed alone for England, leaving her family in New York, harboring plans to meet Lewis. Did she, even then, have designs on him as a mate? Years later, Gresham told Lewis that this had been the case, that Joy had confessed to him, “she was in love with you and had to get to know you,” and that this long-distance infatuation—with a man she had never met—had triggered her flight to England. Gresham’s account cannot be taken on face value; he was not always truthful and, when making this disclosure, had reason to paint his wife in the worst possible light. But it is not implausible. Joy admired Lewis greatly, prized her correspondence with him, and was miserable in her current state. Her husband was, in many ways, her Mrs. Moore; Lewis, a bachelor, a scholar with an enchanting mind, three thousand miles from the wreckage of her marriage, may well have been the symbol, if not yet the realized means, of her release.

  Soon after arriving in England, Joy invited Lewis to join her and a London friend, Phyllis Williams, for lunch on September 24 at Oxford’s Eastgate Hotel. No record remains of this first encounter. It must have been successful, however, for Lewis returned the invitation by asking the pair to lunch with him at Magdalen College. George Sayer, present at the second meeting, remembers Joy as “of medium height, with a good figure, dark hair, and rather sharp features. She was an amusingly abrasive New Yorker, and Jack was delighted by her bluntness and her anti-American views” as well as her curt dismissal of modern literature: “Mind you, I wrote that sort of bunk myself when I was young.”

  The friendship fast intensified, but not without mishap. In December, Joy arrived at the Kilns. To Lewis’s surprise, she encamped for three weeks, thrice longer than he had anticipated. Again he took pleasure in her quick mind and quirky ways, but complained to Laurence Harwood, Cecil’s son, that he felt “completely ‘circumvented’” by a guest who “asked for one week but [is] staying for three, who talks from morning to night … I can’t write (write? I can hardly think or breathe. I can’t believe it’s all real).” But Warnie, who warmed to anyone who warmed to him, seemed to have no regrets, recalling later the “many merry days” of her visit. He liked her spunk, her smarts, and her uninhibited humor, and he nonetheless found her “intensely feminine.” To others, like Chad Walsh, “there was nothing feminine about her.” In addition to her sharp tongue, she looked vaguely froglike with her curved spine and bulging eyes, the result of childhood hyperthyroidism. Warnie told George Sayer that the visit had been a success because “we treated her just as if she were a man.”

  Joy quit the Kilns after Christmas and sailed for America in early January. She had been away for five months. Before boarding ship, she was shocked to receive a long letter from her husband declaring the marriage over, for he had fallen in love and begun an affair with Joy’s cousin, Renée. He worried about Joy’s reaction, unnecessarily as it proved; by the end of January, she was gaily describing to Chad Walsh her Lewisian adventures, her Anglophilia, and her eagerness to begin writing again; by the end of February, she was calling the imminent divorce “a blessed release,” telling Walsh that “Lewis strongly advised me to divorce Bill; and has repeated it even more strongly since I’ve been home.” Lewis was appalled by Joy’s account of her husband’s philandering and violence; he inclined toward a lenient view on divorce, although he accepted the Anglican Church’s ban against divorced persons remarrying. Joy’s letters to friends rang with criticism of her wayward husband and with revelations, sometimes unwitting, of the desperate disorder that gripped her family (“Davy’s quite eager for me to divorce his father—talked to me like a Dutch uncle: ‘There is a point at which patience stops being a virtue!’ says he. And lots more, all very adult and shrewd—uncanny in a child not yet nine.”). One wonders if David had witnessed one of his father’s outbursts, which recommenced as soon as Joy returned home: “Bill greeted me by knocking me about a bit … Two days after he’d half choked me, he asked in all seriousness, ‘Have you ever known me to do a brutal or unkind thing?’” Divorce loomed, the sooner the better.

  17

  THE LONG-EXPECTED SEQUEL

  “This charming house has become uninhabitable—unsleepable-in, unworkable-in, rocked, racked with noise, and drenched with fumes. Such is modern life. Mordor in our midst.” The immediate cause of Tolkien’s wretchedness, retailed to Rayner Unwin a few weeks before hearing the rapturous news that Allen & Unwin would publish The Lord of the Rings, was the unbearable traffic outside 99 Holywell Street. The racket and stink angered him and sickened Edith, who was already in precarious health. On doctor’s orders, the couple began to search for a more peaceful, less polluted locale; on March 30, 1953, they moved to 76 Sandfield Road in Headington, a mile and a half from the Kilns, an upheaval that entailed ten days of “endless labour.”

  The deeper source of Tolkien’s complaint, however, was his growing hatred of machines, especially what he liked to call “the ‘infernal combustion’ engine.” His antipathy had been aroused by firsthand experience of mechanized warfare during World War I, accelerated by the terrible devastation of World War II, confirmed by the atomic bomb, which he described to Rayner as a “billowing cloud” unleashed “by persons who have decided to use the Ring for their own (of course most excellent) purposes,” and underscored by the industrialization of Oxford, where cars now circled the dreaming spires while trees fell and factories rose in the once-bucolic outskirts. Failure to perceive the false allure of industrial progress, he had written Christopher in 1944, was “almost a world wide mental disease.” In this same letter, he drew a stark opposition between machines and art, the first an attempt to seize power in the primary world, the second an attempt to create beauty in the secondary world of subcreation. Lewis had addressed the first half of this equation in The Abolition of Man, pointing out that conquest of nature, which he exemplified by the airplane, the radio, and contraceptives, are expressions of power that result in one group of human beings controlling another (by bombs, by propaganda, by manipulating the future). Tolkien upped the ante, giving distrust of machinery a theological foundation. Just as art points to God, machines point to Satan—or, in Tolkien’s legendarium, to the cosmic tyrant Morgoth and his followers. The monstrosity of machines lies in the hubris and pride of their inventors, who savage God’s truth, beauty, and goodness with tools that bring ugliness, pain, and lies (witness the small lie that automation improves upon handcrafted work and the great lie that power offers more than love).

  Mechanophobia aside, however, Tolkien had reason to rejoice. True, he was exhausted from moving house, overwhelmed by college chores, and afflicted by various ailments—including bouts of flu, neuritis, fibrositis, lumbago, laryngitis, and sciatica—and The Silmarillion remained in limbo. But nothing could suppress the exaltation of knowing that The Lord of the Rings would soon see print. And he was traveling more, enjoying different landscapes and cultures. He returned to Ireland in 1950 and 1951 (and would go again in 1958), serving again as an external examiner for the National University, which would grant him an Honorary D. Litt. in July 1954. In 1951 he summered with Edith and Priscilla in County Kerry, where he sketched nine landscapes. Summer in Kerry, in colored pencil, eschews the sharp contours and geometric patterns of his legendarium-based illustrations for soft, melting masses of olive-green cloud, daubed with white, lowering over a range of gray-green-yellow mountains. Unfortunately, this promising new direction was not followed up, and these Irish landscapes seem to have been his last. He also traveled to the Continent, visiting the University of Liège several times to attend academic festivities, delivering a paper on the Middle English word losenger (“deceiver,” “flatterer,” “liar”—i.e., the type of scoundrel that figures in many of his tales), and receiving another honorary doctorate.

  Tolkien’s reputation as a Middle English scholar advanced yet more when he deliver
ed the 1952–53 W. P. Ker Lecture at the University of Glasgow on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The lecture was scheduled for April 15, just two weeks after the disruptive move to Sandfield Road, and Tolkien rushed to complete the text as the train steamed toward Glasgow. He grumbled about the result, but the published version, which appeared posthumously, holds considerable interest for its stalwart defense of fairy story as the supreme vehicle for moral instruction. Sir Gawain, Tolkien argues, is at heart a moral study, in which Gawain’s temptation to adultery, his hesitation between courtly politesse and Christian virtue, and his final triumph over sin play out against a background of Faërie that serves to “enlarge the scene and the actors,” transforming a bedroom tug-of-war between a befuddled knight and a lascivious lady into a battle for personal salvation.

  Throughout his lecture, Tolkien quotes from his translation of Gawain, begun when he was a fledgling instructor at Leeds but only recently completed. In 1953 the novelist P. H. Newby, at this time a producer at the BBC, proposed that the translation might make a fine Christmas broadcast, especially if someone like Dylan Thomas read the text. Tolkien, perhaps still dazzled by his own performance while recording portions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings on George Sayer’s tape recorder, suggested that he himself might be the right man for the job. He auditioned on September 1 and, with a glint of the vanity that sometimes peeped forth—as in his fondness for ornamental waistcoats—declared that “it sounded to me better than most things I have listened to of the sort—more interesting (more variable and unexpectable).” Tolkien’s delivery held little charm for others, however, and the BBC settled for a professional, multivoice presentation, to be broadcast in four segments over the course of December. The author was invited to introduce the first broadcast and discuss the poem at length in a special January program.