The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  ‘As Warnie says,’ remarks Havard, ‘if we do get a religious revival, it’ll probably be just like that – very Calvinist.’

  ‘I know,’ answers Lewis. ‘And will we like it? I mean, we’ve been delighted to see the churches almost full since the war began, and we talk enthusiastically of a Christian revival among the undergraduates, and there’s certainly some sign of it happening. But I rather think that if it really comes, people like us won’t find it nearly so agreeable as we’d expected. Of course, we ought to have remembered that if the real thing came it would make us sit up. Do you remember Chesterton? “Never invoke gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.”’

  ‘But you don’t think these people enthusing about Barth are necessarily wrong?’ Havard asks.

  ‘No, I don’t. I think the young gentlemen are probably largely right. But between ourselves I have a hankering for the old and happier days, the days when politics meant Tariff Reform, and war was war against the Zulus, and Religion meant that lovely word Piety – you know, “The decent church that crowns the neighbouring hill”, and “Mr Arabin sent the farmers home to their baked mutton very well satisfied”.’

  There is a pause while Lewis lights his pipe. ‘Williams is coming later,’ he says through the stem, ‘but I don’t think anyone else will be turning up. Has anyone got anything to read?’

  Tolkien says that he has brought ‘another Hobbit chapter’ – for some reason he rarely refers to his new book by its formal title, and the Inklings generally know it as the New Hobbit.

  ‘It’s a pity Coghill doesn’t come along on Thursdays much these days,’ remarks Warnie. ‘He liked Tollers’ first hobbit book so much that I’m sure he’d enjoy this.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Tolkien, ‘his “Producing” takes up a good deal of his time.’

  ‘Do you remember Coghill’s Hamlet about five years ago?’ Lewis asks, as Tolkien gets his manuscript ready.

  ‘It was pretty good stuff as such things go, as far as I remember,’ says Warnie.

  Jack grunts. ‘I suppose it was, of its kind, but really I get next to no enjoyment out of these undergraduate productions. They act them in a way that fills one at first with embarrassment and pity, and finally with an unreasoning personal hatred of the actors – you know, “Why should that damned man keep on bellowing at me?”’

  ‘Hamlet is a fine enough play,’ says Tolkien, ‘providing you take it just so, and don’t start thinking about it. In fact I’m of the opinion that Old Bill’s plays in general are all the same – they just haven’t got any coherent ideas behind them.’

  ‘It’s Hamlet himself that I can’t abide,’ remarks Warnie. ‘Whenever I see the play I find myself conceiving the most frightful antipathy to him. I mean, there’s such an intolerable deal of him. Every few minutes all the other characters sneak off in a hard-hearted way and leave us at the mercy of this awful arch-bore for hundreds of lines. I remember when I saw Coghill’s version I thought the only dramatic merit had been supplied by him and not by Shakespeare.’

  ‘You sound as if you want to rewrite the play,’ says Havard.

  ‘And why not?’ answers Tolkien. ‘You could show what a stinking old bore his father really was, before he became a ghost (to the relief of the Danish court), and how nice poor Claudius was by comparison.’

  ‘And how the old man really died of some nasty disease and wasn’t murdered at all,’ adds Warnie.

  ‘And then even in the grave couldn’t keep from mischief,’ continues Tolkien.

  ‘… but had to come back with a filthy cock-and-bull story about a murder, which at first was too much even for his own son to swallow,’ adds Jack Lewis, who admires Hamlet profoundly but cannot resist joining in this nonsense.

  ‘… the son being a chip of the old blockhead, and quite as conceited as papa.’ Tolkien concludes. ‘But I suppose it won’t ever get written.’

  ‘It might make an opera,’ muses Lewis.

  ‘Wagner?’

  ‘No, I think something more in the style of Mozart. We must have a go at it. But let’s hear the new chapter.’

  Tolkien begins to read from his manuscript.

  It is the chapter which describes the arrival of the hobbits and their companions at the doors of the Mines of Moria, and which recounts the beginning of their journey through the darkness. Tolkien reads fluently. Occasionally he hesitates or stumbles, for the chapter is only in a rough draft, and he has some difficulty in making out a word here and there. The pages are closely covered – he has written it on the back of old examination scripts. One or two details are still uncertain: he explains that he has not yet worked out an Elvish version of the inscription over Moria Gate, and he reads it in English; he is uncertain whether the word of power with which Gandalf opens the doors should be Mellyn or Meldir; and here and there he points out that he has got the details of distance or time of day wrong, and will have to correct them. But such small details do not interfere with the concentration of his listeners, for though he reads fast and does not enunciate very clearly, the story quickly takes charge. It is more than an hour before he has finished. Meanwhile the fire burns low, and nobody bothers to throw coal on it. At last he comes to the end.

  ‘“The Company passed under the northern arch and came through a doorway on their right. It was high and flat-topped, and the stone door was still upon its hinges, standing half open. Beyond it was a large square chamber, lit by a wide shaft in the far wall – it slanted upwards and far above a small square patch of sky could be seen. The light fell directly on a table in the midst of the chamber, a square block three feet high upon which was laid a great slab of whitened stone.”’ He pauses and puts his manuscript aside. ‘That’s as far as it runs. The end is in rather a muddle, and there should have been a song earlier, in which Gimli recollects the ancient days when Moria was peopled by Durin’s folk.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s needed,’ says Lewis. (Of Tolkien’s poetry, he generally admires only the alliterative verse.) Tolkien does not reply. Instead he says:

  ‘Did you realise that the faint patter of feet is Gollum following them? He is to reappear now, you see.’

  ‘Oh yes, I think that’s clear,’ says Lewis. ‘And the underground stuff is marvellous, the best of its kind I’ve ever heard. Neither Haggard nor MacDonald equal it. Perhaps you could just spread yourself a little more in the scene where that Thing comes out of the water and grabs at Frodo. It’s a little unprepared at the moment – shouldn’t there be ripples on the water when it starts to move?’ Tolkien agrees and makes a note of this.

  ‘I was struck,’ says Warnie (offering more rum to the company), ‘by that bit about the cats of Queen – what was her name?’

  “‘He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel,”’ quotes Tolkien. ‘Yes. Do you know, I find that rather puzzling. Trotter just made the allusion to her without any forethought by me – she just popped up, in fact. Odd, isn’t it?’ (‘Trotter’ is the character who will later be renamed ‘Strider’.)

  ‘So you’ve no idea who she was?’ asks Jack Lewis, putting more coal on the fire.

  There is a gleam in Tolkien’s eye. ‘No, I didn’t say that. I said she just popped up. Since she did, I do have a notion that she was the wife of one of the ship-kings of Pelargir.’

  ‘Pelargir?’ asks Warnie. ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t: the story hasn’t reached it yet. It was a great port, you see, and poor Berúthiel loathed the smell of the sea, and fish and gulls, like the giantess Skadi – do you remember her?’ (he turns to Lewis). ‘She came to the gods in Valhalla and demanded a husband in payment for her father’s death. They lined everybody up behind a curtain and she selected the pair of feet that appealed to her most. She thought she’d got Balder, but it turned out to be Njord; and after she’d married him she got fed up with the seaside life, and the gulls kept her awake, and at last she went back to live in Jotunhe
im. Well, Berúthiel went to live in an inland city too, and she went to the bad – or returned to it: she was a black Númenórean in origin, I suspect – and she was one of those people who hate cats, but cats will jump on them and follow them about (you know how they can pursue people who loathe them). I’m afraid she took to torturing them for amusement, but she trained some to go on evil errands by night, to spy on people or terrify them.’ Tolkien stops and relights his pipe, and there is a respectful pause from his audience (though in fact a certain amount of what he said was not entirely audible to them, thanks to his speed and the pipe in his mouth).

  ‘I don’t know how you think of these things,’ says Havard, who does not actually find it easy to appreciate The Lord of the Rings, but who certainly admires the fertility of Tolkien’s imagination.

  ‘How does any author think of anything?’ answers Jack Lewis, quick as usual to turn the particular into the general. ‘I don’t think that conscious invention plays a very great part in it. For example, I find that in many respects I can’t direct my imagination: I can only follow the lead it gives me.’

  ‘Absolutely true,’ says Warnie. ‘I mean, when I picture the country house I’d like to have if I were a rich man, I can say that my study window opens on a level park full of old timbers, but I can only see undulating ground with a fir-topped knoll. I can fix my mind, of course, on the level park, but when I turn to the window again after arranging my books, there’s that damn knoll once more.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I find when I’m writing a story,’ declares his brother. ‘I must use the knoll and can’t force myself to use the level park.’

  Havard asks: ‘What do you suppose is the explanation, or the significance? I imagine Jung would ascribe it to the collective unconscious, whose dictates you are being obliged to follow.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Lewis says. ‘Jung’s archetypes do seem to explain it, though I’d have thought Plato’s would do just as well. And isn’t Tollers saying the same thing in another way when he tells us that Man is merely the sub-creator and that all stories originate with God?’ Tolkien grunts in agreement. ‘But the real point is not how it happens (because surely we can never be certain about that) but that it does happen. You see, I come more and more to the conclusion that all stories are waiting, somewhere, and are slowly being recovered in fragments by different human minds according to their abilities – and of course being partially spoiled in each writer by the admixture of his own mere individual “invention”. Do you agree?’ He turns to Tolkien.

  ‘Of course, of course. Although you may feel that your story is profoundly “true”, all the details may not have that “truth” about them. It’s seldom that the inspiration (if we are choosing to call it that) is so strong and lasting that it leavens all the lump, and doesn’t leave much that is mere uninspired “invention”.’

  ‘What about the new Hobbit book?’ asks Havard. ‘How much of that would you say was “true”?’

  Tolkien sighs. ‘I don’t know. One hopes … But you mean, I take it, how much of it “came” ready-made, and how much was conscious invention. It’s very difficult to say. One doesn’t, perhaps, identify the two elements in one’s mind as it’s happening. As I recall, I knew from the beginning that it had to be some kind of quest, involving hobbits – I’d got hobbits on my hands, hadn’t I? And then I looked for the only point in The Hobbit, in the first book, that showed signs of development. I thought I’d choose the Ring as the key to the next story – though that was the mere germ, of course. But I want to make a big story out of it, so it had got to be the Ring, not just any magic ring. (I invented that little rhyme about One Ring to rule them all, I remember, in my bath one day.)’

  ‘But all that part of it was, by the sound of it, mere invention,’ says Lewis. ‘Didn’t you find when you actually began to write that things appeared largely of their own accord?’

  ‘Of course. I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. The Black Riders were completely unpremeditated – I remember the first one, the one that Frodo and the hobbits hide from on the road, just turned up without any forethought. I knew all about Tom Bombadil already, but I’d never been to Bree. And then in the inn at Bree, Trotter sitting in the corner of the bar parlour was a real shock – totally unexpected – and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. And I remember I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear at Bag End on September the twenty-second. What’s more, I can tell you that there are quite a few unexplained things still lurking. Seven stars and seven stones and one white tree: now, what do you make of that? I know it will play some important part in the story, but I can’t say what.’

  ‘In the same sort of way,’ says Lewis, ‘I have a picture in my mind – it’s been there for some time – of floating islands, islands that float. At present (if it interests you even remotely to know it) I’m trying to build up a world in which floating islands could exist.’

  There is a moment’s silence, broken by Warnie.

  ‘Well, Tollers, whether it’s inspiration or invention, I still don’t know how you keep up your story so magnificently. It hasn’t flagged for a moment. I can tell you without exaggeration that simply nothing has come my way for a long time which has given me such enjoyment and excitement.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ adds his brother. ‘It’s more than good: the only word I can use is great.’

  Warnie continues: ‘But how the public will take it, I can’t imagine. I should think, Tollers, you’d better prepare yourself for a lot of misunderstanding. I’m afraid some people will interpret it as a political allegory – you know, the Shire standing for England, Sauron for Stalin, and that kind of thing.’

  ‘Whereas of course the truth’, says Jack, ‘is that no sooner had he begun to write it than the real events began to conform to the pattern he’d invented.’

  ‘I know that Tolkien always reminds us that it isn’t allegory,’ Havard says, ‘but I don’t quite see why it’s so silly at least to attempt to interpret it allegorically. I’m sure that some perfectly sensible people are bound to.’

  ‘Of course they are,’ answers Tolkien. ‘And while, as you know, I dislike conscious and intentional allegory, it’s quite true that any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. And indeed the more “life” a story has, the more readily it will be susceptible of allegorical interpretations; while conversely, the better a deliberate allegory is, the more nearly it will be acceptable just as a story.’

  Havard asks Tolkien: ‘If you’re prepared to admit the susceptibility of your Hobbit story to allegorical interpretation, what particular interpretations do you predict people will make?’

  ‘Well,’ Tolkien says, ‘I suppose all my stuff – both this new story and the earlier mythology from which it derives – is mainly concerned with the Fall, with mortality, and with the Machine. The Fall is an inevitable subject in any story about people; mortality in that the consciousness of it affects anyone who has creative desires that are left unsatisfied by plain biological life – any artist must desire great longevity; and by the Machine I mean the use of all external plans or devices, instead of the development of inner powers and talents – or even the use of those talents with the corrupted motive of dominating, of bullying the world and coercing other wills. The Machine is merely our more obvious modern form. (By the way, did you know that a maker of motor bikes has named his product Ixion Cycles? Ixion, who was bound for ever in Hell on a perpetually revolving wheel!)’

  ‘But can’t you admire any machines? Havard asks. ‘The advance of medicine depends greatly on the benefits that they can confer.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Tolkien replies. ‘But it seems to me that the ultimate idea behind all machinery, however apparently beneficial its immediate function, is to create Power in this world. And that can’t be done with any real final satisfaction – unlike art, which is content to create a new world, a secondary world in the mind.’

  ‘Don’t you approve o
f any labour-saving devices?’ asks Warnie.

  ‘Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. The Fall only makes these devices not just fail of their desire, but turn to new and horrible evil. Look how we’ve “progressed”: from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It isn’t really man who is ultimately daunting and insupportable: it’s the man-made. If a Ragnarök would burn all the slums and gasworks and shabby garages, it could (for me) burn all the works of art – and I’d go back to trees.’

  ‘Certainly we seem to be progressing towards universal suburbia,’ Lewis says. ‘And while, as Havard suggests, the first stages of “Progress” may most certainly be beneficial, we have to know where to stop. And at the moment there doesn’t seem much hope that we will stop.’ He searches among his papers and takes out a sheet. ‘I’ve called this “Evolutionary Hymn”,’ he says, and begins to read.

  ‘Lead us, Evolution, lead us

  Up the future’s endless stair.

  Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us,

  For stagnation is despair:

  Groping, guessing, yet progressing,

  Lead us nobody knows where.

  ‘To whatever variation

  Our posterity may turn,

  Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,

  Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,

  Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,

  Towards that unknown god we yearn.

  ‘Ask not if it’s god or devil,

  Brethren, lest your words imply

  Static norms of good and evil

  (As in Plato) throned on high;

  Such scholastic, inelastic,

  Abstract yardsticks we deny.

  ‘Far too long have sages vainly

  Glossed great Nature’s simple text;

  He who runs can read it plainly:

  “Goodness equals what comes next.”