So, a few weekends ago Janice and I took the mass transit up to the waterfront, where we strolled about a while before boarding a ferry over to Bainbridge Island for an afternoon of poking about. We'd done this a few years back and enjoyed it, so doing it again seemed like a good way to vary the routine. It was.
Among the things we did was drop by both of the bookstores we saw, the used books one back up an alley (where they had an india-paper edition of THE HOBBIT, among other items of interest) and the big one right on the main street. Since I'm actively trying to cut down on the number of books coming in while trying to balance them against books going out, I looked but did not buy. And the most interesting thing I looked at was a new biography of horror writer Shirley Jackson.* I think of Jackson as a talented writer whose work I'm not particularly interested in (rather like Flannery O'Connor), so I was intrigued to find two references to JRRT in the index.
The first passage describes Jackson reading THE HOBBIT to her children:
In the Hyman household,** intellectual curiosity and creativity were cultivated and nurtured. There was singing around the piano and dancing in the living room and art projects at the kitchen table . . . One year, dismayed to discover the children's lack of familiarity with the Bible, Shirley and Stanley read from it every night at the dinner table. Shirley also read her favorite books aloud to the children at bedtime: the Oz series, The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (which she preferred to The Lord of the Rings), fairy tales. (Franklin, p. 168)
-- so not only was THE HOBBIT a favorite book of Jackson's, but we find out she was one of those (a respectable minority) who prefer the earlier book over the sequel.
A second reference to Tolkien is more elusive but even more intriguing, coming during Franklin's discussion of Jackson's correspondence with Jeanne Beatty, a fan who turned into a pen pal. Jackson and Beatty were drawn together by a mutual love of children's fantasy, especially the Oz books. We are told the two women discussed a wide range of books
"from the Oz books to C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Frank Baker's comic mystery novel Miss Hargreaves, about a young man who invents a fictional character and discovers, to his astonishment and eventual chagrin, that his invention has come to life . . ." (Franklin p. 430).
Unfortunately, Franklin does not include what Jackson said about Tolkien, but it's interesting to note that she was ahead of the curve: the correspondence with Beatty seems to have peaked in 1960 and thereafter fallen off, and Jackson herself died in 1965, just about the time Tolkien was taking off.
--John R.
--current reading: Ruth Franklin's SHIRLEY JACKSON: A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE
**Jackson was also Mrs. Stanley Hyman
So since the correspondence with Beatty was flourishing mostly before The Lord of the Rings was published, I wonder when Jackson was reading The Hobbit to her children. Was she preferring it to The Lord of the Rings at that time, or had she not yet read the sequel (due to its not yet having been published), and only made that judgment at a later date?
ReplyDeleteSo since the correspondence with Beatty was flourishing mostly before The Lord of the Rings was published, I wonder when Jackson was reading The Hobbit to her children. Was she preferring it to The Lord of the Rings already, or had she not yet read the sequel (due to its not having yet been published), and only made that judgment at a later date?
ReplyDelete