THE DARK TOWER and A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS

So, I've been reading (or more accurately re-reading) a number of books by  David Lindsay, whose first and most famous book, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, celebrates its centenary this year. And I was struck by something I had previously passed over without its drawing my attention: a striking parallel between  Lindsay's book and Lewis's THE DARK TOWER. Lewis openly confessed his debt to Lindsay, particularly to OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, but I don't think I've seen anyone extend the influence to include the final, unfinished fourth book of the Ransom series. 

I'm all tied up with other projects right now, but if I were going to write this up I'd focus on one of the most striking things in A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. Lindsay's work is famous for the way his protagonist grows new organs and appendages once he enters the alien world, the first of which is a breve, described as "something hard on his forehead . . . a fleshy protuberance, the size of a small plum, having a cavity in the middle, of which he could not feel the bottom" (VtA.44) 

This is strongly paralleled by what happens to Lewis's hero:  when Scudamour jumps through the chronoscope, switches places with his double, and arrives in the Otherworld, he acquires a sting growing out of his forehead: "It was broad at the base and narrowed quickly to its point, so that its total shape was rather like that of a thorn on a rose-branch . . . It was hard and horny, but not like bone . . . and . . . [d]ripping with poison" (DT.33). But where Maskull's breve granted him telepathy, The Stingerman's sting converts those he attacks with it into automatons. 

In addition to this major point of the appearance of otherworldly organs on the forehead, three other paralleled elements between Lewis's unfinished work and Lindsay's odd masterpiece might be worth exploring.

First,  the seance that opens Lindsay's book, along with the materialization of a being from the other world into our own, parallels the projection of images from another world that opens Lewis's. MacPhee even has an exchange with Orfieu about the validity or otherwise of psychical research.  

Second, there's the image of the Tower that so dominates Lewis's story, while a similar tower frames Lindsay's work, appearing first as the Observatory early in the book, then reappearing as Krag's tower at the story's climax, containing the long sought for route into the true world, Muspel. 

Third, it might be worthwhile to do something with the theme of doubles: Maskull and Nightspore in Lindsay's book (so that one cannot appear until the other is gone) and Scudamour/the Stingerman in Lewis's.

As I said, I'm too absorbed in something else to write this up and develop the argument. And besides, I've already had my say about THE DARK TOWER in my essay on the interrelations between Lewis's Ransom books, esp the first and fourth one) and Tolkien's two time travel stories.* And I've also already said pretty much what I had to say about A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS.**

On the other hand, if anybody has explored / developed the DARK TOWER / VOYAGE  TO ARCTURUS parallels and I just missed teir piece,*** I'd be happy if someone points me to it.

--John R.

*this appeared in TOLKIEN'S LEGENDARIUM, an unofficial festschrift for Christopher Tolkien (2000)

**in my online monthly column CLASSICS OF FANTASY: Lindsay's strange masterpiece was the focus of the sixth essay (January 2003). It's no longer up on the Wizard's site but can still be found online with a bit of internet searching

***I think I've read all the scholarship on DARK TOWER, but you never know

Clyde Kilby's Collected Essays

So, just before Christmas arrived the new book by the late Clyde Kilby, A WELL OF WONDER: ESSAYS ON C. S. LEWIS,  J. R. R. TOLKIEN, AND THE INKLINGS (ed. Loren Wilkinson & Keith Call; Mount Tabor Books/Paraclete Press 2016). I'd been asked to provide a blurb and had been happy to submit one,* which I'm glad to see they used. Here's  what I said in the blurb:

As the first decades of Inklings scholarship 

recede from living memory, it's good to see 

the papers of an influential critic from that 

period made available again. Kilby is now 

mainly remembered for founding the Wade

Collection, but he was also among the first

to see the Inklings as a coherent writers' group,

and the pieces collected herein make the case

for considering these authors in context

with each other's work. Perhaps the out-

standing piece is his short account of

meeting C. S. Lewis at Oxford in 1953;

published in 1954, this is one of the earliest

memoirs of Lewis to see print, and it's good

for it to see the light of day again after

more than a half-century.

In the current book, this piece appears as Chapter 2: "My First (and Only) Visit with Mr. Lewis", p. 16-19.  The two men met for about half an hour, by appointment, in Lewis's office at Magdalen. Lewis was fifty-four at the time and engaged in compiling the bibliography for his O.H.E.L. volume; he talked about all the exercise he got from lugging folios about and disparaged the idea of naming 'periods' of literature, like "the Renaissance" ("an imaginary entity responsible for everything the modern reader likes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries"). They spoke of Palestine, and Lewis expressed a curiosity over whether the re-establishment of Israel (it having been created as a new nation only six or seven years before) wd mean a rebuilding of the Temple and a restoration of sacrifice.

Questioned about art and Xianity, Lewis pooh-poohed the idea of Christian literature: "He said the same relation existed between Christianity and art as between Christianity and carpentry" -- that is, that a carpenter might be a Xian but this didn't mean that he produced 'Xian carpentry'. Told of Wheaton College's founder's description of a novel as "a well-told lie", he dissented strongly, saying that "one is far more likely to find the truth in a novel than in a newspaper".   They talked a little about the then recently deceased C. E. M. Joad**

Asked when he might come to America, he was emphatic that this cdn't take place before his retirement. As for a specific invitation to come that very summer, he replied "he had to get some vacation then, and a trip to this country [i.e., the US] would be anything but a vacation." He autographed a book for Kilby, somewhat reluctantly (Kilby does not say which one of CSL's bks it was, only that he had brought it with him). When Kilby expressed a wish to hear Lewis lecture, Lewis first said there were no lectures scheduled (presumably the visit took place during one of the breaks between terms) and teased Kilby for being a "professor [who wanted] to hear a lecture while on vacation". They talked a little about metaphor and then Kilby, fearing to overstay his welcome, departed.

In addition to the Lewis piece, the volume also gathers together pretty much all the account of Kilby's meetings with Tolkien that had been originally published in Kilby's little book TOLKIEN AND THE SILMARILLION.*** I haven't gone through and compared to see if all that material is now here, but certainly most of it is, making this essay collection a good place to read an account by someone who had the chance to read virtually all of THE SILMARILLION during Tolkien's lifetime.

There are also a number of essays on Lewis and on Tolkien, largely focusing on Xian aspects or interpretations of their work, as well as an essay apiece on Williams and on Sayers, and at least two on CSL, JRRT, et al being considered together as 'the Oxford Group'

All in all, well worth having on the shelf.  As an extra added bonus, the dust jacket has a nice picture of four Inklings together: Dundas-Grant, Hardie, Havard, and Lewis. It's a well-known piece, but this is the best reproduction of it I've seen, and its presence here is appropriate, given that Kilby was co-author of the book IMAGES OF HIS WORLD, the first to gather together photos of Lewis and his friends.

--John R.



*after all, with the exception of Deborah Sabo I think Kilby and I are the only Tolkien scholars to have been at Fayetteville, Arkansas -- albeit decades apart.

**whom Tolkien once described as 'Joad of Joad Hall', suggesting that his personality bore more than a little resemblance to Kenneth Grahame's Mr. Toad

***herein  titled Chapter 15: "The Evolution of a Friendship and the Writing of The Silmarillion
At thirty-three pages I think this is the most substantial memoir of Tolkien yet published, aside from the FAMILY ALBUM.

Inklings Murder Mystery ("The Sinister Student", ) SPOILERS

So, I've now finished the fourth of Kel Richards' C. S. Lewis mysteries. This one I think reads better than the rest, simply so far as readability goes. But like the previous books in the series, it does have what was for me an absolute jump-the-shark moment. I think in general if you liked any of those previous books, you'll probably like this one too. And if you didn't like them, there's not much hope for this time round.


First, there's the murder mystery -- which need not be taken too seriously, given that the murder victim is revealed on the back cover of the book. Richards tends to favor wildly improbable methods of murder he pulls out of the hat; in this case the murder weapon and hence murderer are obvious from very early on.

Second, there's the P. G. Wodehouse sections. Whenever Richards' point-of-view character runs into the girl he's sweet on, they lapse into faux-Bertie Woosterisms (what ho, what ho). They even mention by name several times a Wodehouse character (Florence Cray, one of Bertie's onetime ill-matched fiancees). I'm a great admirer of Wodehouse myself, so I'm glad to see that Richards is too, but his imitation shows that it's harder than it looks. In short, Richards is not just not another P. G. Wodehouse: he's not even another P. H.  Cannon.


Two things that are very much to the good in this book, that makes it stand out and made it a more enjoyable read, for me at least, than its predecessors, is the Oxford setting and the inclusion of J. R. R. Tolkien as a character. I'm obviously a soft touch when it comes to books set in Oxford, and much more so when it comes to Tolkien. And for all this faults, Richards does produce a character named 'Tolkien' who actually plausibly resembles the real person of that name -- something many who have written JRRT into their stories as a character have utterly failed at. It's also nice to see a reconstructed Inklings meet (one Thursday night in Lewis's rooms, the other on a Tuesday at the Eagle & Child), with a plausible roster of Inklings in attendance: Lewis himself, Warnie,* Tolkien (who reads them his just-finished last chapter of THE HOBBIT), Nevill Coghill, Adam Fox, and latecomer Hugo Dyson. I'm sorry to see Dr. Havard doesn't make an appearance at either meeting, but then they were an informal group and it wasn't at all odd that one or another of them cdn't turn up at their gatherings, so I just told myself Humphrey was busy at the clinic that week. And while in his previous books Tolkien was just mentioned a time or two, he's a fairly major minor character this time around: after the point-of-view character (Young Morris) and CSL, I'd say Warnie and Tolkien probably show up the most often, often to comment on the ongoing events.


As for the jump-the-shark moment, for me this came when the rather odd visiting researcher who kept trying to meet Tolkien and Lewis, and seemed strangely informed about their works (including ones not-yet-published), turned out to be a time-traveller from the future who'd come back to Oxford 1936  in his tardis specifically to meet those two great writers. His tardis has a functioning chameleon circuit, so it takes the form of a wardrobe, thus giving Lewis the idea of travelling to another world by entering a wardrobe. And while it's clear the traveller isn't Doctor Who himself, he might as well be; he even uses a sonic screwdriver at one point to uncover a clue for Lewis et al. And if I'm reading Richards rightly, it's the time-traveller who's responsible for the famous bargain between Lewis and Tolkien: he certainly accidentally gives JRRT the idea of writing a story about Atlantis.


So, not a turn of events that I saw coming, and not one that I thought improved his book. If it had worked for me, I suppose I'd be calling it jump-the-genre instead of jump-the-shark. I suppose I shd give him points for originality, but is it originality to be the first person to have a really bad idea?

--John R.




*in one rather nice touch, Richards admits in an endnote that he calls Warnie 'the Major', even though he now knows Warnie was still Captain Lewis at the time, simply because it sounds right: Warnie is widely known as 'the Major' among fans of the Inklings.

Seeing Susan Cooper

So, thanks to someone in our book group sending out the word (thanks, Matt), Janice and I found out about Susan Cooper's being scheduled to give a speech tonight down in Puyallup as part of their first annual Book Fair (which they're combining with the celebration of their library's centennial).  We thought we'd allowed plenty of time, but inexplicable slowdowns on Hwy167 (the valley highway) meant we arrived just as folks were getting seated.

There were actual several parts to tonight's event: three songs performed by the Revels, a group/ musical movement I'd not heard of before today but wh. Cooper has been involved with for decades,* a brief talk by a fellow who I think is director of the library, a film tribute to the English teacher whom they were naming the lecture series after (Jim Taylor). The surprise appearance of Ursula K. LeGuin, tomorrow's featured speaker, to give the introduction to Cooper's talk tonight was an added bonus, LeGuin being her usual articulate, witty self (with the occasional sting, as is her wont), and warm to boot (which is not always the case).  And then of course there was the lecture itself, partly autobiographical and partly focused in on the importance of libraries; she also spoke at the end about her latest novel, GHOST HAWK, about the local Native Americans who once lived where she now lives, in a house that sounds right out of THE WOMAN IN BLACK (Marshfield House, surrounded by sea-marshes and by salt water when the tide is high). Having grown up in London nightly bombings during World War II, she made clear that there's nothing like the knowledge that people are trying to kill you, without your personally having done anything to them or even having met them, to start you thinking about the evil humans do to each other. It was a good talk; glad we made it.

Tomorrow it's LeGuin's turn, so we're planning on heading back down for that (and to see if Cooper returns the favor and introduces LeGuin in turn); thanks to Gyda (also of book group) for letting us know LeGuin was coming. They're also having a mini comicon, so there shd be plenty to do.

If I'd had a chance to ask her a question, it wd have been about whether she ever went to any of Tolkien's lectures -- having worked out from her age and learning that she went to Somerville College that she must have just missed Lewis but wd have been there when Tolkien was still there. Turns out she addresses this in an interview on her website (http://www.thelostland.com/about/interview.html): I was wrong, in that she did go to Lewis's lectures as well as some of Tolkien's. The only detail she gives about him being that he was "rather mumbly" but she does mention how they all eagerly awaited the publication of THE RETURN OF THE KING, which pretty much dates it. She also talks about the Tolkien/Lewis syllabus' focus on preVictorian literature, with the result that their exposure to Malory and Spenser encouraged an interest in dragons.

I also learned from her website that she's published a book of essays and lectures. DREAMS AND WISHES [1996], which I'll have to track down, given that I enjoyed her talk tonight enough to want more.

I do have to add that I had one real shock during the short film they ran honoring Jim Taylor, the Puyallup high school English teacher they've named the new lecture series after. Included in the happy memories of how inspiring a teacher he was came one woman's account of how he burned her twelve-page essay (on WAR AND PEACE I think it was) before the whole class because she'd ended a sentence with a preposition. I'm sorry, all my years of teaching (two at Fayetteville, seven more at Marquette, not to mention Continuing Education night classes) rose up in revulsion at any teacher who'd do that to a student. And over such a crackpot thing such as ending sentences with prepositions. Gah!

But as for the lecture itself, and the whole book fair: they're off to a great start, and I hope it becomes the ongoing tradition they plan for it to be. In all the years I've lived in the region (is it really sixteen years since we left Wisconsin?), this is just the second time I've been in Puyallup. The first time was to visit their local cheese shop, which disappointingly turned out not to carry Cheshire. This second visit was far more satisfactory. We'll see how the third once tomorrow goes.

Here's the link for the Book Fair et al:

http://www.puyallupfestivalofbooks.com/

--John R.
current reading: THE MAGICIANS AND MRS. QUENT by "Galen Beckett"

*(their singing is excellent, but they have an annoying habit of trying to get the audience involved, then dropping that audience en masse once they're done with them)

E. M. Forster and C. S. Lewis (SCREWTAPE)

So, a few weeks back (W.4/10) I came across an interesting conjunction between two figures we usually think of as inhabiting different worlds: C. S. Lewis and E. M. Forster. Today Morgan Forster is remembered for his associations with the Bloomsbury Group (as a welcome visitor rather than a core member) and for his epic writer's block -- he wrote four novels between 1905 and 1910, then emerged from silence in 1924 with a fifth; his sixth appeared posthumously almost half a century later, in 1970. But despite his scanty output he was one of the great novelist of his time and cast a long shadow over the early twentieth century --for example, his influence is obvious on Barfield's ENGLISH PEOPLE [1930] and Tolkien's LOST ROAD [circa 1936].

Although Forster ceased writing fiction, he continued to write essays. And he made many radio broadcasts, some have now been transcribed, collected, and published, in THE BBC TALKS OF E. M. FORSTER 1929-1960: A Selected Edition, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Macleod Walls [2008]. And, in one particular talk ("Some Books": W. Feb. 3rd 1943; pp.222-226), he discussed C. S. Lewis's new book, THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS:

"What's wrong with the world? Three out of four books I'm mentioning try to answer this question. Something is wrong with a war every twenty-five years, national and communal and racial hatred, frightened individuals, people starving in one place while food is being destroyed in another. If we listen to the past we can, as it were, hear that same ugly tune of human failure played quietly. Today it is being played fortissimo, and it is often difficult to listen to anything else. So it is natural that three out of these four books should deal with the question.

  You've probably noticed in books -- and in yourself -- two tendencies. Sometimes when you ask yourself what's wrong with the world, you answer 'It wants reorganising economically. When a basic standard of physical comfort has been achieved, the rest will follow'. And this is the attitude of Mr. Mulk Raj Anand in his "Letters on India", one of the books on my list. At other times you'll answer, 'No it wants a change of heart. When we become different -- and better -- as individuals, then the rest will follow'. That is the attitude of Mr. Gerald Heard, a practising mystic, and a pacifist, in his new book "Man the Master". And a change of heart is also demanded by an orthodox Christian writer, Mr. C. S. Lewis, in his "The Screwtape Letters". Mr. Heard and Mr. Lewis have very little in common. But they both take hold of the psychological end of the stick, as opposed to Mr. Anand who takes hold of the economic end. Which end do you take hold of yourself?

   I will take Mr. C. S. Lewis first. He is an Oxford don, and a layman of the Church of England, and he writes to justify the Christian point of view, and to give the Christian interpretation of what's wrong with the world. Sin is what's wrong, wars and starvation being only a consequence, and although the Creator of mankind is good and omnipotent, men sin because he chose to give them free will, and because they choose to make a wrong use of that will. Mr. Lewis attacks these mysteries in an interesting book called "The Problem of Pain" which I've also been reading, but I won't talk about it here. I will confine myself to a much livelier work, "The Screwtape Letters". But besides being a theologian, Mr. Lewis is as clever as they make 'em, if I may use the expression. He is witty and ingenious, and sometimes recalls the late G. K. Chesterton, though he hasn't Chesterton's robustness. Here is a book of his "The Screwtape Letters" which purport to be written by a devil called Screwtape who has rather a good position in an underground office, and writes weekly to his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood is on earth, in charge of a mortal, and being young and inexperienced is constantly making mistakes, and driving his patient toward righteousness instead of the reverse direction. Screwtape advises him on each occasion, for instance what to do when the patient quarrels with his mother or falls in love or is converted to a religion. Unfortunately the patient dies in an air raid, when he behaves heroically, and is saved. Wormwood loses his prey and returns to Hell where his affectionate uncle eats him up.

   A couple of sentences which will give you the taste of the book. Screwtape is writing about the Future, and says, it is of all things the least like eternity:

   "Hence the encouragements we have given to all those 

schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific 

Humanism, or Communism which fix men's affections 

on the Future. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future.

 Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present: 

fear, avarice, lust, and ambition to the Future".

   I should have thought that Hope looked to the Future too, and that it is a virtue. However I am not here to criticise either Mr. Lewis or Screwtape, but to indicate the provocative little book which they have collaborated to produce. Mr. Lewis does not believe in progress or that the world will be put right by humanism or by planning. It is wrong because men have sinned, and they have sinned because God has left them free to choose between good and evil, and, tempted by the devil, they have chosen evil. The world, indeed, is not a place to put right. It is a place to do right in.

   Compare with this view the view of Mr. Gerald Heard. Mr. Heard also begins with the unseen. Like Mr. Lewis he believes that the world has gone wrong for psychological reasons, but there the resemblance between them ends, for he believes that the miseries with which we are all surrounded -- the war, the starvation, the mutual hatred -- can be averted if we like, and that now is the moment . . . 


---at this point, Forster devotes two paragraphs to Heard's book and then one to Anand's, his most interesting comment in this part being

. . . I always feel when reading Mr. Heard's books --- and I think I've read them all -- that his analysis of our troubles is convincing, but that his remedies are not.

---Surprisingly enough, it turns out that Heard's ideas are very similar to Barfield's, as expressed in works like UNANCESTRAL VOICE (his masterpiece):  

. . . He [Heard] holds on the evidence of anthropology, that men were once in touch with each other instinctively like a herd of animals, that they have lost touch, thought the development of individuality, and that they must re-establish it or perish

---In the end, Forster sets out the differences between these three books thusly: 

re. Mulk Raj Anand's LETTERS ON INDIA: "his general attitude is "Make people comfortable and then they'll be good". Whereas Mr. Heard's attitude is "Make people good and then they'll be comfortable". And Mr. Lewis's is "Make people good and it doesn't much matter whether they're comfortable or not".

The final section of his review is quite interesting in itself but completely different from what came before: here his book is a collection of letters by Sir Henry Ponsonby, Private Secretary to the Queen (1870ff) -- the man responsible for managing Queen Victoria's schedule. These provide an odd glimpse into a vanished world where the Queen communicated by note: "the Queen . . . did not like seeing people unless she was sure they were going to agree with her", including her own family; thus a constant stream of message-bearers up and down the chilly halls of Balmoral ("Queen Victoria disapproved of fires") carrying messages back and forth between the queen, her children and the staff. Forster concludes

It was a strange job and a strange age -- though I suppose a philosophic observer, or an economic expert for that matter, can see latent in it the evils which have risen to the surface and occupy Mr. Heard and Mr. Lewis and Mr. Anand today. Even in these days the evil melody of war is already being played -- but softly, a sinister undertone.  We today are much more conscious than the rulers and the people of the Victorian era. We know much better what the human race is up against. And it may be that our successors, fifty years hence, will know much better than we do, and will consequently discover solutions. 

--E. M. Forster

Larkin's Game of 'Spot the Inkling'

So, it's not particularly well known that Philip Larkin, before he became the great English poet of his generation, had begun his career as a novelist, and only abandoned writing fiction when writer's block made it impossible for him to continue. And it's even less know that, in addition to his two published novels, he left several early unpublished and/or unfinished novels, two of them dating from his time at Oxford. Having just read his 'Oxford novel', WINTER TERM AT ST. BRIDE'S, I was amused to see several Inklings references in it, and thought I'd share.

WINTER TERM AT ST. BRIDE'S (written 1943; published posthumously in 2002) is a sequel to Larkin's TROUBLE AT WILLOW GABLES (ibid.), which had been a deliberate attempt to write a 'girls' school' novel (he even wrote an accompanying essay analyzing the genre). This second attempt follows the adventures of some of the same girls as they arrive at Oxford for their first university experiences. One goes all-in for sports, another spends all her time studying, one blows off all lectures for social events, and so forth (which only goes to show how thoroughly women had become acclimatized to Oxford a mere twenty-odd years since first being admitted as full students).

What's amusing from my point of view is a running motif about a new detective story set in Oxford, Edmund Crispin's THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY [1944]. Crispin is famous today for another novel in the same series (the fourth, SWAN SONG [1947]) including the line "There goes C. S. Lewis . . .  It must be Tuesday" [p.60] as his detective et al. sit in the front room of the Bird and Baby (so called by Crispin, rather than Eagle and Child). In real life, "Crispin" was a friend of Larkin's named Bruce Montgomery, but  THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY (the first in the series) had appeared pseudonymously, and Larkin gets a good deal of fun out of the fact that in his novel everyone is speculating about who wrote it and assigning various absurdly inappropriate Oxford luminaries to the role of being hidden behind the pseudonym: Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil, and C. S. Lewis prominent among them.


[first excerpt, page 198-199]

"Three coffees," said Margaret to the waitress.

   Marie, Margaret, and Mary were in Elliston's next morning at eleven o'clock. Marie had just come from Blackwell's, where she had bought her daily book; Margaret had been pursuing her own private affairs since breakfast-time; while Mary, strange to say, had only just got up. She felt rather hungry.

   "And buns," she added. "Buns for one — or two," she added, catching Marie's eye. "What's the book, Marie? Looks rather a shocker."

   "It's a detective story," said Marie guiltily, displaying the yellow wrapper. "A new one."

   "The Case of the Gilded Fly?  I don't like Oriental things. I suppose it's full of Chinamen and sliding panels."

   "It may be," Marie answered. "I believe it's rather good," she added dubiously. "By Nevill Coghill, you know."

   "Who's he?"

   "Look here, what's the latest but Hilary?" interposed Margaret . . .   

[second excerpt, pages 215-216; Hilary meets 'Diana's Set'] 

   "Now, let's have a little bright intellectual conversation!" commanded Diana, clapping her hands. "Come on, Pam. Say something intelligent."
   "Are you reading an interesting book?" Hilary asked, looking at the beige-and-grey volume* lying face downwards on the thick carpet. "Who's it by?"
   "Oh, it's Lord David Cecil's book," said Diana carelessly, snatching it up. "The Case of the Gilded Fly, you know. I'm half way through it."
   "Diana dear, I'm sure it's not Lord David," said Pam. "Someone was telling me it was C. S. Lewis."
   "Oh no, dear, not C. S. Lewis. It's obvious that 'Fen' is a caricature of Lewis. Fits him to a T. Horribly malicious."**
   "Surely if it were by Lewis it would be about God," suggested Hilary, cautiously exhaling smoke.
   "If it were about God it would have been in the Daily Mirror first," said Pam. "Anyway, there's no place for God in a detective story."
   "Oh, it's a detective story, is it?" said Diana, frowning at the book with renewed interest.
   "As a matter of fact, I think you're all wrong," said Miriam. "Someone told me yesterday, straight from the horse's mouth, that it was by Lord Berners. But do keep it quiet."
   "Well, that would account for the music bits," agreed Diana. "But do you think it's good enough for Berners?"
   "Heavens, I haven't read it," said Miriam, shrugging her shoulders. "Haven't the ghost of an idea."
   "I expect in the end you'll find it was by Stanley Parker," said Pam . . . 

[*note: we're meant to assume Diana is so incredibly swanky that she even has cheap novels recovered in her favorite colors]

[**i.e., Gervase Fen, Crispin's eccentric-professor detective]

[third excerpt, page 219; one of the characters develops an obsession with belts]

   "I've tried everything. I've been long walks. I've been to the theatre and cinema. I've even read detective stories." Here she waved a despairing hand towards a copy of The Case of the Gilded Fly which lay on the mantelpiece. "But nothing does any good. I'm lost. Nothing can save me now."

[fourth excerpt, page 230]

[Here, things begin to get really weird. One character gets so drunk that she wanders out of the story and briefly encounters characters from the previous story ("Willow Gables"), who explain to her that she's in the current story but they're not; then she strays into real-life, where those present include Montgomery himself:]

. . . near the door, a pale girl with distant eyes and pale-rimmed spectacles laid one hand on the arm of her companion, a severe young man with a walking-stick, and said:

   "But what are you going to call it, Bruce dear?"

   "I shall call it," said the young man in the voice of one who has no doubt, "The Case of the Gilded Fly". The pale girl looked uncertain. "It's from King Lear," he added crossly.

---I admit to not knowing Lord Berners, or what the joke as concerning the Daily Mirror, and the editor himself confesses ignorance as to "Stanley Parker"

---Still, I was fascinated by this little spoof. After all, one of the Inklings DID write detective stories, though under his own name: Charles Williams. And both Coghill and Lewis contributed poetry to Oxford magazines pseudonymously. Lord David Cecil never wrote any fiction at all that I know of, but he was someone Larkins and Kingsley Amis never tired of mocking for his aristocratic speech patterns.

---Larkin, by the way, knew Charles Williams slightly and rather liked him as a drinking companion, though he had a v. low opinion of C.W.'s poetry and found him rather a figure of fun for frequently quoting poetry and always getting it wrong (though, as with Rev. Spooner, the degree to which Williams misquoted may have been exaggerated for effect).

---one more element of the joke: everyone in Larkin's novel (written 1943) is reading Crispin's book, whereas the real book came out in '44 and was probably still being written at the time Larkin's characters were making their speculations about its author.

---I suppose we shd count ourselves lucky that Larkin didn't fix on another of his professors who annoyed him, JRRT, for inclusion in this dubious gallery of faux-detective story writers.

--in any case, an amusing glimpse into Oxford personalities when the Inklings were in full flight.

--John R.

Waugh and Cabell

So, sometimes you're panning for gold and instead you find an interesting nugget of copper. That's what happened to me recently. I was looking up something in a biography of Mary Renault and found a surprising passage which seemed to quote Evelyn Waugh commenting (negatively, this being Waugh) on Lewis and Tolkien. I was not aware of any evidence that Waugh even knew Tolkien existed, much less passed judgment on him, so this seemed something worth following up.

Accordingly, next time I was at the university library doing research, I dug out the Waugh biography given in the book on Renault as the source of the quote,* and found out it was a false lead. Waugh did indeed express that opinion of certain Oxford types, but he didn't name Lewis or Tolkien: it was Renault's biographer who decided L and T were among the people Waugh was criticizing, and put their names into the context. Which might well be the case, but if so it was a general, not a specific or personal, criticism: the Waugh record remains, so far as I know, Tolkienless.

However (and here's where the nugget of copper comes in), a second Waugh biography I checked just in case** revealed the unexpected information that young Waugh was a great admirer of James Branch Cabell, and that his "first serious attempt at fiction" was heavily influenced by J.B.C. Here's the passage in question:


The result was Evelyn's first serious attempt at fiction. It was a macabre story of death entitled Anthony, Who Sought Things That Were Lost. It was set in a tyrannical grand dukedom of Italy in the year 1848. Harold [Acton] published it in The Broom in June 1923. Fears aroused by the preciosity of the title are fully confirmed by reading.

Of this juvenile work Evelyn wrote that it 'betrays the unmistakeable influence of that preposterously spurious artefact, which quite captivated me at the age of nineteen, James Branch Cabell's Jurgen'. The severe self-judgement must stand, but it is to be noted that Harold, according to his own account, had already begun to convert Evelyn from Cabell towards a worthier model, Ronald Firband. Evelyn's story, gruesomely telling of an imprisoned pair of lovers, and the decay of their passion amid the horrors of the dungeon, and of how the love of 'the Lady Elizabeth' was transferred from 'Count Anthony' to the jailer, and of their murderous end, certainly shows the rubbishy influence of Cabell; but others are evident as well. There are weak echoes of Oscar Wilde's 'Happy Prince' stories, of Edgar Allan Poe, of Firband. Oddly enough the strongest resemblance is to an author whom neither Evelyn nor Harold is likely to have read or even to have heard about then, Frederick Rolfe, 'Baron Corvo'. At that time he was completely forgotten. The story is not by any standards a good piece of writing . . . 

[Sykes, p. 47]

I have to admit I've never read any Firbank -- an omission wh. I shd perhaps rectify -- but I do take exception at Sykes' snide dismissal of Cabell, whom I consider a much better writer than Waugh himself. Not that the synopsis given sounds anything like JURGEN, which is worldly and witty, cynical and salacious. Cabell had his limits, and doesn't lend himself well to imitation, but he also had real talent.

The main surprise is that Waugh would have chosen a famous fantasy author as a role model, and an American at that. As with Dunsany at about the same time, it's easy to forget today how popular, and admired, Cabell was as a writer in the late teens and early twenties of the last century.


By the way, it's my understand that Tolkien did read JURGEN and didn't like it (cynical, salacious, and irreverent not being exactly his cup of tea); Lewis also read it (probably at the urging of Joy Gresham***), as is shown by various passing allusions to the book (e.g., AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM, p. 50), but I can't recall his discussing or evaluating it.


So: a fairly typical mainstream dismissal of a fantasy influence on a major twentieth century British author, but of interest for what it reveals about said fantasy author's influence and wide appeal at the time.

--John R.
current reading: SPEAKING FROM AMONG THE BONES (2013)






*EVELYN WAUGH: THE EARLY YEARS 1903-1939, by Martin Stannard [1986], pages 85-86



**EVELYN WAUGH: A BIOGRAPHY, by Christopher Sykes [1975].


***Joy G. being an admirer of both Cabell and Dunsany.

The New Arrival: PARMA Twenty

So, things continue to arrive -- and we haven't even begun to hit the wave of Hobbit-themed/ related books that shd stretch over the next two or three years.

This one is as far from a movie tie-in as is possible to imagine: the latest issue (Vol. XX) of PARMA ELDALAMBERON, the long-running series of linguistic documents by JRRT edited by a team consisting of Bill Weldon, Chris Gilson, Arden Smith, Carl Hostetter, and Pat Wynne. This particular volume is of interest even to those for whom elven linguistics are a dark mystery, in that it focuses on Tolkien's alphabets -- specifically, documents written in tengwar, Tolkien's beautiful invented elven script. This 160-page volume is full of facsimile reproductions of page after page in Tolkien's flowing tengwar, each followed by a literal transliteration and then a normalization (e.g., replacing phonetic spelling with normal English spelling). These are not Quenya texts: the words, when deciphered, are English (or, in a few cases, Latin): only the alphabet/writing system is invented.

Among the contents are many prayers (e.g., The Lord's Prayer) and nursery rhymes (e.g., The Three Wise Men of Gotham, There was a Crooked Man, Old King Cole), and poems ("The Walrus & the Carpenter" and Tolkien's own "Bombadil" and "Errantry"), along with some misc. ("God Save the King" and the opening lines of BEOWULF).

Best of all, there is also some interesting original content: a diary entry (for May 23rd [?1931]), the opening page of an otherwise unknown modern-day story ("Littlehampton"), a three-page fragment the editor has dubbed "Philosophical Thoughts", and several letters.

This last include some to people that have otherwise never appeared in any Tolkien biography, so far as I know,* but also one to E. V. Gordon (whom he addresses, interestingly enough, by his middle name, as "Valentine") and to C. S. Lewis. The former discusses, briefly, their colleague Turville Petre, whom Tolkien seems to have held in higher regard than did EVG. The latter is clearly a cover letter for a description of the elven alphabet, which Lewis had asked to see: an interesting bit of evidence that CSL's interest in the 'mythology' extended beyond just the stories (this is in keeping with the 'documents' approach he chose when critiquing the Lay of Leithian). It also contains Tolkien's resolution not to go off on family holiday that year but to spend two weeks of down time on his own in Oxford.

The diary entry is mostly about Tolkien's day spent gardening until interrupted by rain (and hence time to write up the diary entry), but also includes an interesting bit where he muses over whether his phonetical usage of an invented script will baffle future decipherment, comparing his usage to Pepys' shorthand. One final surprising bit is his writing the line

Anna Livia Plurabelle

at the top of one page, before striking it out: a reference to Joyce's as-yet-unpublished FINNEGANS WAKE, fragments of which (including "Anna Livia Plurabelle") had been published as far back as the mid-20s. This makes the third reference Tolkien made to Joyce's work that I know of, showing he was more aware of (if not favorably disposed to) the work of his contemporaries than is generally assumed.

The so-called 'Philosophical Musings', though brief (3 pages), are also of interest, not just in a mention of Dyson but also for the following comment by Tolkien re. atheism:

. . . We also talked of

idealist philosophy and ath-

eist -- the latter of which

has always been to me

unintelligible: I have

never understood how any-

one nowadays could re-

main in such a position

if position it can be

called.

In short: an interesting issue, and well worth looking through even for the non-specialist. Anyone wanting to order a copy of his or her own shd go to

http://www.eldalamberon.com/parma20.html

*one H. M. Margoliouth, an administrator at Oxford, and Dr. Sturrock, the Tolkien family doctor before Havard.

Final Thoughts re. Wilson

So, three more scattered tidbits that might (or might not) be worth sharing.

(1) Wilson thought so highly of his attack on Tolkien ("Oo Those Awful Orcs") that he sent a copy to Cabell, asking his opinion of Tolkien's book. [EW to JBC, Apr 12 1956; LETTERS ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS, p. 542-543]. There's no record of Cabell's response (I even once asked Leon Edel to help me find if there was one, but to no avail), other than that Wilson found it "a delightful surprise" [EW to JBC, May 16th 1956; ibid p. 543].

(2) There's no record, so far as I know, of Wilson's ever having read C. S. Lewis (I suspect he wdn't have considered any of CSL's fiction "literature"*), but as an equal-opportunity insulter, he did once make a passing slap at Charles Williams, in the poem "The Mass in the Parking Lot"

. . . And whom should we meet there, on the loose,

But Andre Gide in a big burnoose.

What were his words of wisdom? Damn it,

He was whooping it up for Dashiell Hammett.

More correctly garbed, we encountered later

T. S. Eliot, the Great Dictator.

Having just awakened from troubled sleep,

He told us Charles Williams was terribly deep.

And Wystan Auden, with rigorous views

But his necktie hanging around his shoes,

Expounded his taste for detective stories,

Which he reads to illumine the current mores . . .

[NIGHT THOUGHTS, 1961, p. 181]

(3) Finally, yesterday I found out that Edmund Wilson's son with Mary McCarthy was named . . . Reuel Wilson.

Can't make this stuff up.

--JDR

-----------------------------

*what with the trilogy being science fiction, and the Narnia books children's books. TILL WE HAVE FACES might have interested him, but that book of Lewis's didn't do v. well and there's no reason to think Wilson ever heard of its existence. Plus, of course, Wilson disliked Xianity, and CSL's apostlizing was the single best-known thing about him.

The Impossibility of Writing Fantasy in 1937

So, I'm making my way through the audiobook version of Christopher Hitchens' last book, a massive (24-disk) collection of essays called ARGUABLY. Given my distaste and dismay at most of Hitchens' political views (he was a Trotskyite who became a neocon, an ardent and obstinate advocate for the Iraq war), I find my favorites by far are the literary essays, which range from Orwell (his hero and role-model) to Rowling and Larsson.

The less I know about an author, the more I find I enjoy what Hitchens has to say about him (or, rarely, her), whereas when I'm familiar with an author's works I become aware of just how skewed Hitchen's portrayal of his work is. For example, it'd be nice to think that Ezra Pound lost his poetic talent at the same time he openly adopted heinous political and cultural views, as Hitchens asserts, but it's also quite untrue -- some of the cantos written when he was a prisoner of war at the end of WWII, and in the asylum afterwards, are heartbreakingly beautiful. There's no good moral to be drawn from this; it's simply a fact of literary history. But against that, I find I have to have a soft spot for anyone who praises Wodehouse as much as Hitchens does, so for that alone much is forgiven.

One particular piece included an interesting quote about fantasy, a topic rarely mentioned by Hitchens:

"A modern fantasy cannot tell the truth

cannot give a picture of life

which will survive the test of experience

since fantasy implies in practice

a retreat from the real world

into the world of imagination"

This comes not from Hitchens himself but is a quote from the now-forgotten Edward Upward, who was a member of Auden's circle back in the early '30s but, unlike Spender and Isherwood and Day-Lewis and MacNeice, wound up fading from view, having put his political views ahead of literature.

The source Hitchens gives is to a book called THE MIND IN CHAINS, edited by C. Day-Lewis in 1937; Upward's contribution was an essay called "A Marxist Interpretation of Life". While the book itself is difficult to find, it turns out that Upward's essay is readily available on-line (http://www.edwardupward.info/pdfs/Sketch.pdf). The relevant passage comes on page seven. The context is Upward's claim that, the current (in his day) struggle between communism and capitalism/fascism has reached such a crisis point that it's irresponsible for the writer to do anything besides whole-heartedly embracing communism and writing from that perspective; to write fairy-tales in such a time was simply dooming yourself to irrelevance in a world "which is daily drifting towards a war of unprecedented destructiveness"; elsewhere he refers to "the approach of a new world war" (the earliest I've seen that phrase in print). Here are a few quotes that caught my eye as I skimmed the piece:

"no book written at the present time can be 'good' unless it is written from a Marxist or near-Marxist viewpoint" (emphasis his, to exempt earlier writers such as Shakespeare)

"no modern book can be true to life unless it recognises . . . both the decadence of present-day society and the inevitability of revolution"

"It is possible that the 'fairy' story -- celebrating the triumph of man over dangers and difficulties -- will reappear on a higher, more scientific level" (i.e., after the triumph of Marxism)

"the old forms can no longer adequately reflect the fundamental forces of the modern world. The writer's job is to create new forms now, to arrive by hard work at the emotional truth about present-day reality. He cannot begin to do that until he has in his everyday life allied himself with the forces of the future, until he has gone over to the socialist movement."

"failing to go over [to socialism] must prevent him from writing a good book" (emphasis his)

"a modern fantasy might be a more or less truthful imitation of past fantasies, but it could not be true to the life or our own time as the work of earlier fantasy-writers was to the life of their times"

As a rejoinder, I'm reminded of Dunsany's preface to THE LAST BOOK OF WONDER, where he describes his tales written during WWI as like something he's throwing out of a burning house, of value to himself if to no one else.

The deep irony that just as Upward was declaring the impossibility of anyone's writing fantasy nowadays that could have any kind of relevance to the modern world (he not long afterwards suffered such a creative crisis that he lapsed into silence for decades), JRRT was publishing THE HOBBIT and writing that famous first chapter of THE LORD OF THE RINGS -- a book which infamously got taken as an insightful comment on the recent events of history. And, one might add, that if it didn't change the world, certainly changed the world of literature, though it took a long time to do so.

I'd be surprised if Tolkien picked up Day-Lewis's anthology or ever read Upward's little screed, but it's certainly possible. We know Auden thought highly of Tolkien's lectures, which he attended while an undergrad at Oxford, but we don't know much of what Tolkien thought of Auden at the time, or even if he was particularly aware of this undergraduate that all his fellow undergraduates thought the great poet of his generation. About fourteen years later, it wd be Day-Lewis who defeated C. S. L. for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford, a coming-of-age triumph for the Auden generation against the forces of reaction in poetry (CSL, like Dunsany, was still in attempting a rear-guard action against the previous revolution in poetry, that of Pound and Eliot, even as Auden's generation was beginning to give way to Larkin's).

Unlikely though it seems that Tolkien would have come across Upward's piece, he might well have heard of it second- or third-hand. In any case, he was obviously familiar with the attitude expressed in it, which is one of those he refutes decisively in his section on Escape in ON FAIRY-STORIES two years later (1939).

Still: an interesting example of attitudes Tolkien faced at the time he set out to create his masterpiece. We're lucky that, like Dunsany, and Eddison, and so many others he went his own way, rather than followed the dictates of those who considered themselves in the know back in the day.

--John R.

just finished: AMERICAN CAESARS by Nigel Hamilton (#II.2994)

current reading: THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD.

T. H. White, Inkling

So, one thing I saw at the H.R.H.R.C. in Austin was a letter from C. S. Lewis to T. H. White. Turns out this is indeed in COLLECTED LETTERS (which I really am going to have to get around to reading some time, however daunted by its vast bulk) but not in its proper chronological place: although having been written in 1947 it's not in Vol. II (1931-1949) but at the end of Vol. III (1950-1963), in the hundred-plus page Supplement of letters left out elsewhere for one reason or another.

Since the letter's readily available there, all I'll say about it here is that it's occasioned by the publication of MISTRESS MASHAM'S REPOSE, which delighted Lewis as much as White's earlier THE SWORD IN THE STONE (wh. I much prefer) had annoyed him. So much so that he wrote White a letter in mock-Swiftian prose -- not as good as the Johnsonian prose of his famous letter to Harwood, or the wonderful Malorian letter to Barfield (cf. MARK VS. TRISTRAM), or the pseudo-medieval letter(s) to E. R. E., but impressive nonetheless.

What really caught my attention, though, was the closing paragraph, wherein Lewis invited White to attend an Inklings meeting if ever he were passing through Oxford:

. . . If your occasions should lead you to these Academick Groves I shall beg leave to make you acquainted with half a dozen madcap fellowes* that have a freer and more masculine taste.** Till then, Sir, may you accept my Gratefull thanks for the Entertainment you have given me and believe me

your oblig'd obedient servant . . .

*this was my reading of the Ms. letter; Hooper in COLLECTED LETTERS prints instead 'Magdalen Fellows'. If I had the original in front of me I might be able to determine which is right; as it is, I give my reading as (a) being what I thought I saw and (b) making more sense, with the caveat that Hooper's certainly better at reading Lewis's handwriting than I am.

**i.e., than the woman mentioned two sentences before in the letter whose review of M.M.R. CSL thought insufficiently glowing.

The idea that T. H. White was invited to attend an Inklings meeting, much as CSL had invited Ch. Wms. eleven years before, tickles my fancy with what-ifs. So far as I know, White never took them up on this, and I'm sure that if he had one of the Inklings wd have mentioned it somewhere. In terms of his personal life, White would have been an uneasy fit for 'the Tolkien-Lewis seance', having been a minor second-generation associate of what people liked to call 'Bloomsbury' (though the same cd be said of Ld David Cecil, who seems to have fitted in well enough). But in terms of his love of the medieval -- translating the Bestiary, writing the most popular twentieth century Arthurian retelling -- he and Tolkien (who wrote four Bestiary poems and an unfinished retelling of the Arthurian myth himself) wd have had plenty to talk about.

Alas for the might-have-beens!

--John R.

Tolkien's Style (Nobel, con't)

So, one point I wanted to follow up on in my previous post about the news of Tolkien's having been nominated (though obviously as a long shot*) for a Nobel Prize in literature was focusing in on the specific reason given for his rejection: literary critic Anders Osterling's judgment that Tolkien's prose did "not in any way measur[e] up to storytelling of the highest quality". David Bratman, in his comment on my original post, points out the difficulty involved in judging the prose style of a work in a foreign language. I don't know how members of the Swedish academy generally handle this -- it's unlikely they're all fluent in all the languages in which the major nominees write -- but I'd think they'd be wary of making stylistic judgments based on translations. Something worth finding out more about.

In any case, I don't think Osterling's charge shd pass unanswered. Even though made fifty years ago, its only being released now means that it'll soon be seized upon by Tolkien bashers as evidence that Tolkien's really not a literary figure but simply a pop-cultural phenomenon.**

Attacks on Tolkien's style are endemic, but oddly enough some of them come from people who are otherwise well-disposed to Tolkien's work, in the midst of essays which praise Tolkien and stress his importance as a writer, which is somewhat bizarre. Prime examples include Stephen Medcalf, whom I saw giving a major presentation in which he kept reading out loud individual sentences from LotR and saying how bad they were, as if it were self evident (neither I nor I think anyone else in the audience agreed). An early and influential example is Burton Raffel in his essay in Isaacs & Zimbardo (TOLKIEN & THE CRITICS, 1968) in which he pillories Tolkien's prose and suggests readers love this stuff purely because of the storytelling.

I don't know why Tolkien scholars have been so slow to challenging the Medcalfs and Raffels in their midsts, when they've been all too eager to take on clueless outsiders like Harold Bloom and Edmund Wilson. I've done what I cd in my recent articles, esp. the Marquette lecture that appeared in TOLKIEN STUDIES, "A Kind of Elvish Craft, Tolkien as Literary Craftsman", to argue that Tolkien is a v. careful stylist who deliberately weighed the effect of each word. The only person I know of who's made a spirited and detailed defense of Tolkien's style a major aspect of their work is Brian Rosebury in the two editions of his book (the first of which I greatly admire, the second of which I've only skimmed as yet). I hope there'll be more work along these lines, so that the Tolkien-bashers aren't met with silence or worse a half-grudging admission that one of the most widely read and obsessively re-read writers of our times really cdn't write v. well. Which is nonsense, pure and simple.

--John R.

..................

current reading: THE CHINESE LAKE MURDERS by Rbt Van Gulik

*does CSL's nominating him demonstrate that Lewis was prescient about a great writer in their midst who had not yet been recognized (which is how I'd like to take it) or simply prone to cronyism (which the evidence of the whole making Adam Fox Professor of Poetry and promoting his pad Ch. Wms as among the greatest poets of the century)? Or, perhaps, some mix of the two?

**there were no comments on the Guardian piece when I first read it, but later that same day there were a long string, and even a quick skim of a few showed the Tolkien-bashers were already out in force. Any popular author, or director, or actor, generates a crowd of anti-fans who delight to deprecate his or her work at any opportunity, and Tolkien is no exception.

Tolkien's Nobel

So, thanks both to the MythSoc list (thanks Alana) and also friends (thanks Bijee), today I learned about the time Tolkien was nominated for a Nobel Prize. Apparently the Prize Committee seals their records regarding any particular year's deliberations for fifty years, and for the past few years a Swedish journalist named Andreas Ekstrom has examined the newly revealed results. This year it was the 1961 records that were made public, and Osterling discovered that JRRT was one of those up for the Literature prize, along with luminaries like Rbt Frost, E. M. Forster, Grahame Green, and Lawrence Durrell: the award eventually went to Ivo Andrie (whose work I confess I've never read, and know nothing about).

It's not so much that Tolkien didn't get a Nobel that's interesting as the revelation that he was ever considered for one. And so shortly after his masterpiece, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, came out (six-seven years earlier). And that his nomination came from his old friend C. S. Lewis, who'd apparently been asked as a recognition of his status as Cambridge professor.

The reasons for some candidates' rejection are strange. Frost, for example, was rejected as too old (86), while Forster was not only too old (82, I think) but something of a burn-out case (he'd only published one novel in the preceding fifty years, and that'd been over thirty years earlier) Durrell they considered obsessed w. sex. Greene came in second place (while the article doesn't say so I suspect Greene's thrillers counted against him as lowbrow 'entertainments'), and Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen) in third.

Not to have gotten the award is no disgrace -- in more recent years the committee rather pointedly refused to give it to Borges, for example, and one prominent member of the Academy went on record to say that not to have given it to Dinesen was a big mistake. It must also be said that some of the past winners strike most today as decidedly eccentric choices: I've always found it a good trivia question to ask folks if they can name the first writer in English to win the prize (Rudyard Kipling, of all people). And it's hard to feel that purely literary judgments were made when Winston Churchill got it for his histories (explaining the brilliance of his own career). But it's also gone to those whose work has stood the test of time, like Yeats (when he still had a lot of great poetry yet to write) and T. S. Eliot (who received it when he was something of a spent force, though there's no way they cd have known that at the time).

The reason given for rejecting JRRT, however, is striking. In the words of committee member Anders Osterling, "the result has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality". So we can add another name to the Edmund Wilson Hall of Fame of those who Got It Wrong. Here's the link to the piece:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/05/jrr-tolkien-nobel-prize?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly%27s+PW+Daily&utm_campaign=b0403d58d8-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email

One further interesting bit it that we'd known for several years now that C. S. Lewis considered Tolkien Nobel-worthy material, just not that he'd acted on it. In a January 7th letter to Alastair Fowler,* Lewis wrote

"In confidence. If you were asked to nominate a candidate for the Nobel Prize (literature) who wd be your choice? Mauriac has had it. Frost? Eliot? Tolkien? E. M. Forster? Do you know the ideological slant (if any) of the Swedish Academy? Keep this all under your hat"

--Collected Letters, vol. III, p 1224

I'd always assumed Lewis was just expressing an opinion (and one that did him credit), not that he was actually having an imput into who was actually getting nominated. And as we can see three of the four men he mentions did get consideration, while the fourth (TSE) had actually won the award almost a quarter-century earlier.

--John R.

*the same Lewis scholar who authenticated THE DARK TOWER

New Lewis Fiction

So, Friday the new issue of VII arrived, containing as its lead article the first publication ever of some early (circa 1927?) fiction by C. S. Lewis, here given the title the "EASLEY FRAGMENT" (THE EASLEY FRAGMENTS wd have been more apt, given that it consists of two disconnected pieces). This is something Lewis scholars have known about for a long time -- three sentences were quoted from it as far back as 1973 -- but it's only now seeing the light of day. It's quite brief: nine pages in Warnie's original transcription in THE LEWIS PAPERS and taking up pages 5-12 & 12-15 in this edition* -- and thus less substantial than, say, THE DARK TOWER (sixty-four Ms pages); more along the lines of AFTER TEN YEARS (fifteen Ms pages and similarly consisting of two disconnected pieces). Even so, I'm impressed with the generosity of the Lewis Estate in allowing this new Lewis story to appear in a scholarly journal rather than, say, in some new edition of complete short fiction by CSL.

As for the piece itself, the first chapter is a first-person account of a Bristol doctor visiting his late father's family in Ulster for the first time not long after the Great War (in which he served in the trenches, while they stayed safe at home wrapped up in their own concerns). Having always taken them at their own evaluation, he learns that they are not at all as they presented themselves in their own guilelessly self-serving accounts in the letters he has occasionally received from them. The fragment breaks off, however, before we actually get to meet them; all we get is a bit of the narrator's background and his long conversation with a self-satisfied cadger of drinks he runs into on the ferry over. So Lewis's "Irish novel" doesn't actually get as far as actually landing in Ireland itself -- though, to be fair, he opens by claiming that 'Belfast' begins at the Liverpool ferry terminal. Lewis's goal is clearly to let unlikeable characters reveal their character flaws through their speech, completely unaware of what a bad light they show themselves in, while the narrator forebears to make comment. Jane Austen cd pull this off; unsurprisingly it turns out the young C. S. Lewis had not mastered the art.

The second fragment is sometime later in the internal chronology of the story and consists of an argument between the doctor and a minister. The doctor's aunt is suffering from a terror of damnation, and the doctor accuses the minister of driving her mad with such nonsense. The minister responds that he considers a concern over salvation or damnation as a sign of mental health, not madness. The scene is not v. interesting as a piece of fiction (too talky; a thin fictional frame for a philosophical debate), but as documentation of Lewis's views it's fascinating. We know that at the time he wrote this,** Lewis was, from all accounts, in agreement with what he presents here as the doctor's point of view (the doctor also resembles young CSL in other ways we need not go into here). And yet we know that within a few years, Lewis had swung around 180 degrees and was fully in agreement with the minister's view. So can this passage be taken as a prefigurement of his shift? Or an example of how totally he switched his deepest held convictions? Or can it be read as occupying some middle ground, a way-station on the path?

The other interesting thing about this fragment is how it fits into the biographical narrative of Lewis as a failed author, which I discuss in my piece on his famous bargain with JRR Tolkien that resulted in THE LOST ROAD, OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, PERELANDRA, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS, and THE DARK TOWER.*** It was through his discovery of A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS and THE PLACE OF THE LION, and through that bargain, that Lewis concluded that genre fiction was the right medium for him, while Tolkien though he made a good-faith effort discovered the opposite was true for him: he had to follow his own, sui generis course. So it's interesting to see CSL here try his hand at a sort of local-color fiction, another genre outside the mainstream of his day.

And with this publication, I think we have pretty much all CSL's significant work now in print, except for his unfinished Morris-ian Arthurian romance THE QUEST OF BLEHERIS (about sixty pages) and his philosophical papers (which really shd be published in conjunction with Barfield's interlocking responses.

--John R.

*between brief headnote, notes, bibliography, and commentary by the editiors (David C. Downing and Bruce R. Johnson), it takes up pages 5-26 of this issue (VII. vol. 28).

**assuming Warnie got the date right, which seems a reasonable enough assumption -- esp. since he was compiling THE LEWIS PAPERS while living w. CSL (as I understand it, they were actually typed in a side-room in Lewis's office at Magdalen), and he cd easily have asked his brother when the work dated from. Were it not for that, I'd have thought it from the early twenties rather than towards the end of the decade.

***cf. my essay appearing in TOLKIEN'S LEGENDARIUM [2000]

Stone of Invisibility

So, I've been reading one of the impulse buys I got in the book room at Kalamazoo, THE MAN IN THE MOONE by Francis Godwin, published posthumously in 1638. It's the story of a man who managed to reach the moon by harnessing a bunch of migratory geese together. As one of a cluster of 'visit to other planet' tales from that period,* it pulls together ideas from all over: Godwin's interest in long-range signaling and in secret languages/codes, the 'green children' legend, theories of gravity, &c. Two of Godwin's most interesting ideas involve lunar language and magical stones.

Godwin's explorer, a diminutive Spaniard named Gonsales,** finds that the lunar language consists of musical notes, so that they can communicate through singing melodies; he even uses musical notation to depict it [p. 109]. Later, when upon his return to Earth he finds he's landed in China, he suggests a lot of similarities between Lunar and Chinese (e.g., in the latter's emphasis on pitch and tone).

Gonsales also finds a new colour on the moon (shades of Lindsay's jale and ulfire, and of Lovecraft's Colour, and of Bierce):

. . . how to describe the colour of them . . .

It was neither blacke, nor white, yellow, nor redd,

greene nor blew, nor any colour composed of these.

But if you aske me what it was, then I must tell you,

it was a colour never seen in our earthly world,

and therefore neither to be described unto us by any,

nor to be conceived of one that never saw it.

For as it were a hard matter to describe unto

a man born blind*** the difference

betweene blew and Greene, so can I

not bethinke my selfe of any meanes

how to decipher unto you this Lunar colour,

having no affinitie with any other

that ever I beheld with mine eyes.

Onely this I can say of it, that it was

the most glorious and delightfull, that

can possibly be imagined; neither in truth

was there any one thing, that more delighted me,

during my abode in that new world, than

the beholding of that most pleasing and

resplendent colour. [p. 100]

A few hints made me suspect that this may have been one of CSL's source-books for OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET -- Gonsales' discovery that space is filled with light (apparently a common belief during the period), or that he discovers the Lunar inhabitants to be not just good Xians (Godwin was a bishop, after all) but in an apparently unfallen state, with no murders (it's simply too hard to kill each other, given Lunar vitality) and a peaceful acceptance of death when one's time has come. However, it's clear from editor Wm Poole's apparatus to the book (sixty pages of introduction and forty of appendices, bracketing not quite sixty pages of actual text) that Godwin's was part of a tradition, and I don't know enough about that tradition (though I plan to learn more).

One passage of Tolkienian interest was in Gonsales' description of the new types of rocks he found on the moon; here the editor notes that Godwin is drawing on THE BOOK OF SECRETS attributed to Albert Magnus; a reference to the creation of artificial shining stones might be worth following up on. Of particular relevance, though, is the passage about Stones of Invisibility:

I inquired then amongst them, whether they had not

any kind of Iewell or other meanes to make a man

invisible, which mee thought had beene a thing of great

and extraordinary use.

And I could tell of divers of our learned men

had written many things to that purpose.

They answered that if it were a thing faisable,

yet they assured themselves that God

would not suffer it to be revealed to us creatures

subject to so many imperfections, being a thing

so apt to be abused to ill purposes; and that

was all I could get of them. [p. 112]

--all v. Platonic!

--John R.

current book: THE MAN IN THE MOONE by Francis Godwin [1638]

current audio book: THE DUNWICH HORROR, HPLHS 'radio-play' adaptation (just finished)

...................................

*which I suspect I'll start to read my way through, off and on, one by one, prob. stating with Kepler's SOMNIUM [1634]

**referred to on the title page as "Domingo Gonsales, The Speedy Messenger" -- a distant inspiration for Speedy Gonzales, perhaps?

***cf. C. S. Lewis's story of the same name.

Lewis Loved Being Read To . . .

So, yesterday I had a wicked thought.

I was working on something else, and came across some print-outs from an online discussion I'd taken part in a year and a half or so back about C. S. Lewis's response to the ending of THE HOBBIT. My main point was that we simply don't know what about it he didn't like and can only make more or less well-informed guesses. But in passing I had suggested, somewhat light-heartedly, that maybe Lewis just had trouble reading Tolkien's handwriting and this irksomeness got in the way of his enjoying the final part of the book (that is, the handwritten conclusion to the composite typescript/manuscript Tolkien circulated among his friends between early 1933 and mid-1936) -- forming a barrier between him and full 'secondary belief' submersion in the text.

Re-reading this, and taking into account a new idea I'd had recently regarding the two missing pages from the DARK TOWER manuscript, it suddenly clicked with something Tolkien once said, which I now saw cd be taken in a whole new light. In a 1965 letter to Dick Plotz, Tolkien wrote how

". . . C. S. Lewis was one of the only three persons who have so far read all or a considerable pan of my 'mythology' of the First and Second Ages, which had already been in the main lines constructed before we met. He had the peculiarity that he liked to be read to. All that he knew of my 'matter' was what his capacious but not infallible memory retained from my reading to him as sole audience . . ." (LETTERS p. 361)

What if Lewis's preference that Tolkien read aloud all his works to him stemmed from an aversion to making his way through JRRT's notoriously bad handwriting? Obviously this can't be the whole story -- we know he sometimes borrowed manuscripts, as when he made such detailed commentary on "The Lay of Leithian" and when he inadvertently destroyed the only copy of one of Tolkien's stories. But I know I'll be on the look-out now, reading memoirs of Lewis and the like, for accounts of others besides Tolkien whom he invariably preferred aloud read to him.

--John R.

just finished: NIGHT ON THE GALACTIC RAILROAD by Kenji Miyazawa.

just starting: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON by Edmond Hamilton.

MY LATEST PUBLICATION: Clyde Kilby Memoir

So, today came the long-awaited arrival of the newest volume of VII, the Wade Center's journal focusing on the seven authors to whom the Wade center is devoted (Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Sayers, Barfield, Chesterton, & MacDonald). I'm particularly pleased to see it, because it includes a piece I edited: Clyde Kilby's guest-of-honor speech at the 1983 Marquette Tolkien Conference. Essentially this is a memoir of his summer working with Tolkien, which focuses mainly on his belief on why Tolkien never finished THE SILMARILLION. I heard Kilby deliver it at the conference, and it wd have been a key part of the published proceedings, but a string of delays eventually forced cancellation of that project. Too bad. But at least now this one piece has finally made it into print. Now if we can only get Paul Kocher's essay into print as well . . .

From my personal point of view, as a student of the history of fantasy and Tolkien's role in the creation of fantasy as a modern literary genre, the most interesting point was Kilby's revealing that one of the books Tolkien loaned him to read as preparation for working on THE SILMARILLION was Lord Dunsany's THE BOOK OF WONDER [1912]. One discovery that was new to me, not having been mentioned in the lecture itself but jotted on one draft, was learning that Tolkien also recommended Sheila Kaye-Smith's THE CHALLENGE TO SIRIUS [1917] as "[the] best novel of the US Civil War". I don't know of any previous evidence that Tolkien knew Kaye-Smith's work; while largely forgotten today (aside from having been mocked by Stella Gibbons' COLD COMFORT FARM) she was famous in her own time both as one of Hardy's heirs and for a famous conversion to Catholicism in 1929 along with her husband (hitherto an Anglican priest).

Quite aside from my own interest in this volume from my own contribution, this issue has much else of interest in it. The lead article prints for the first time what its editor argues is the only part ever written down of Tolkien & Lewis's erstwhile collaboration, LANGUAGE AND HUMAN NATURE. There's also a short biography of Lucy Barfield and two Owen Barfield poems (one never before published)and a memoir of Lewis at Cambridge. So, all in all, a good issue; I'm looking forward to reading the other pieces.

--JDR

Festschrift for Walter Hooper

So, the latest new arrival -- again appearing on my doorstep only two days after being ordered* -- is C. S. LEWIS AND THE CHURCH: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF WALTER HOOPER, ed. Judith Wolfe & Brendan N. Wolfe, a collection of essays presented to Walter Hooper in honor of his eightieth birthday. I'd heard about this from Chris Mitchell while at Wheaton a few weeks back, although modestly enough he didn't tell me he was a contributor (other familiar names include James Como and Michael Ward).

Now that I have the book in hand, it looks to be an interesting collection. For one thing, it addresses an issue that Lewis scholarship has skirted for decades: CSL's affinities with specific denominations. Lewis himself adopted the pose that his was a 'mere' (essential) Xianity, though in practice this meant conservative Anglican. In his works he was on the whole pretty successful in avoiding taking up positions identified with specific branches of the Anglican communion: neither 'High Church' (Anglo-Catholic) nor 'Low Church' (the more evangelical part of the church, and the closest to what most of us wd call Protestant) and certainly not 'Broad Church' (those who wanted to modernize the church and its theology)-- these last being the group CSL utterly opposed. And yet while Lewis himself was indisputably Anglican, many of his most devoted readers are Roman Catholic or Fundamentalists. There have been a few attempts to look at Lewis's affinity or otherwise with one particularly denomination -- most notably Derrick's C. S. LEWIS & THE CHURCH OF ROME -- but on the whole it's been a topic everyone more or less agreed to de-emphasise, until now.

Of the essays, the Introduction is of immediate interest for its account of the summer when Hooper met Lewis. After that, when I come to read the book I'll probably start with the final section, a set of four essays looking at Lewis from the perspectives of Catholicism, the Orthodox Church, and Evangelicalism. I'm curious to see if it addresses a topic Hooper spoke about when I got to see him address the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society during my 2007 visit to the Bodleian: the fact that the audience Lewis originally wrote for, his fellow Anglicans, have by and large drifted away, while he's acquired a whole new audience, mainly Evangelicals, in America.

In the meantime, here's my own little tribute to Hooper, written as part of an 'Encomium for Walter Hooper' at the time he was presented with the Wade's Lifetime Achivement award (October 2009):

How pleasant to meet Walter Hooper

Whose editing work has been super

-lative. Eight thousand pages

Of the Magdalen sage's

Thoughts on paper, now preserved for the ages.

But oh how pleasant to sit over tea

And talk of good books and of good company

He, with his "soft-spoken Southern courtesy"**

And I, with ears wide open.

--JDR

*ordered M.4/25, arrived W.4/27 -- amazon's really on the ball these days

**the phrase is Tolkien's

C. S. Lewis's New Book

So, while there are new books about C. S. Lewis all the time, it's a rare event that there's a new book by C. S. Lewis -- that is, 'new' not as 'newly reprinted under a different title' (which are legion) but as in 'never published before' (which are rare and, given the nature of things, increasingly rarer).

Which is why I was surprised to learn of Lewis's translation of Vergil's THE AENEID, which I first heard about a month or so ago, courtesy of Jason Fisher:

http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2011/03/lewiss-lost-aeneid.html

For more information, see also his follow-up post:

http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2011/04/description-of-cs-lewiss-lost-aeneid.html

It's too bad the work is fragmentary, but then like most Tolkien scholars I'm not put off by unfinished works -- and, if it comes to that, THE AENEID itself is unfinished: Vergil only got half-way through the story (twelve books out of a planned twenty-four, intending to match Homer*), and left instructions that what he had written was to be burned because he'd not had time to put the final polish on it. Lewis himself left behind relatively few unfinished works, the most significant of which are THE DARK TOWER and AFTER TEN YEARS.

It's good to be reminded that both Tolkien and Lewis were good classical scholars with a solid background in the Classics (Tolkien himself once refers to THE AENEID as a far greater work than BEOWULF, one of the texts he devoted his career to promoting). I'm not too keen on Vergil myself -- I prefer Homer, esp. the Homer of THE ODYSSEY** -- but I am looking forward to seeing what an author w. as lively a prose style as CSL can make of it. At any rate, it can hardly fail to be better than the C. Day Lewis translation foisted off on us in undergraduate days, which I never did succeed in getting all the way through.

More later, after I've had a chance to see, and read, the book itself.

--JDR

*whereas centuries later Spenser too died half-way through THE FAERIE QUEENE, completing six books out of a planned twelve; only one wonderful fragment of the lost VIIth book survives as "The Cantos of Mutability"

**when my undergraduate professor learned that I preferred THE ODYSSEY to THE ILIAD, he paused for a moment and then said, "You would". He did not intend it as a complement.