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.

Michael Ward's NARNIA CODE

So, I've been watching the dvd devoted to Michael Ward's theory that the seven chronicles of Narnia are meant to subliminally resonate with the seven planets in the Ptolemaic system. I'm pretty dubious about the theory, but I'll keep it in mind if (more likely when) I need to re-read the Narnia books somewhere down the line.

What's more interesting than the claim itself is that it casts Lewis as exactly the kind of writer he himself publicly disparaged: he denounced writers whose works can only be understood with private knowledge about the writer which he or she withholds. I suppose it might be argued that Lewis buried the evidence within the work, but that seems to me special pleading, given that Ward reads CSL's alliterative poem "The Planets" as key to 'breaking the code' -- a work never published with the Narnia books or in any way connected to them by Lewis. Even the circumstantial evidence from Lewis's lecturing on the Ptolemaic system (in his lecture series written up as THE DISCARDED IMAGE) relies on outside biographical evidence of exactly the sort Lewis disdained when criticizing T. S. Eliot.

Be that as it may, this documentary brings together a constellation of Lewis scholars and wd be of interest for that reason alone, to put faces to those familiar names. In addition to Ward himself, who is ubiquitous, there are James Como, Brian Sibley, Alan Jacobs, Jerry Root, Don King, Walter Hooper, and others whose names are unfamiliar to me: Francis Spufford, John Wilson, Malcolm Guite, Eric Metaxas. We also get to see a lot of interesting places, like the Kilns, Magdalene College (though not Lewis's rooms therein), Addison's Walk, the Eagle and Child (inside and out), WWI trenches (hadn't realized any of these survived), the Wade Center, Lewis's grave, etc.


So, how big a deal is Ward's theory? Well, in addition to this documentary [2009?] it's been featured in two books (PLANET NARNIA [2008] and THE NARNIA CODE [2010]), one of which won the Mythopoeic Award. And if this were not enough, I gather from a recent news article that Ward, along with recent Lewis biographer McGrath and Prof. Susan Cooper, who holds Lewis's chair at Cambridge, will be taking part in the ceremonies to mark Lewis's commemoration in Poet's Corner later this year. So, within Lewis scholarship it's been a big deal, or at least that (ever-increasing) part of it devoted to Narnia studies.


Two passages I found myself in disagreement with:

First, Ward claims that Lewis was incapable of slapdash or careless writing as a result of his training in argument by The Great Knock. Hence, if the Narnia books seem sloppy, that surface confusion can't reflect the reality of the work: any flaw lies in the reader (i.e., his or her insufficient knowledge), not the book being read. That seems to me wrong-headed. It also I think mistakes rhetorical gifts (which Lewis had in abundance) for literary ones (which he also had in abundance, and the further he kept the two apart, the better the result). Ward's presupposition that the Narnia books are superlative, and hence we must search until we find the missing element that will make them so, I think begs the question.

Second, Alan Jacobs assertions that
(a) when Lewis returned to Oxford after the war, he found himself much older than his fellow undergraduates (true enough, but only if one excludes all his fellow returning veterans, of whom there were many)
(b) unlike other skeptics and atheists, Lewis had a love of learning (this is simply insulting to all scholars and scientists who are not also theists -- like, say, the Great Knock)
(c) When Lewis tried to teach philosophy he discovered he cdn't because he didn't have a philosophy of his own (so much for the years of developing his position through the 'Great War' with Owen Barfield).



For me the highlights of the piece were threefold.
First, I really enjoyed the three scenes in the re-enactments that featured Tolkien (played by Rbt Hickson, with Anton Rogers as CSL). I've now discovered, rather to my surprise, that these are apparently all taken from an earlier documentary (CSL: BEYOND NARNIA, circa 2005); thanks to Jessica Yates for letting me know. The three re-enactments in question were  (1) that fateful night on Addison's walk (T, L, and an unnamed third [=Dyson]), (2) Dyson's 'bloody elf' episode, and (3) Tolkien calling out Lewis on Narnia.

The middle of these, meant to represent a typical Inklings meeting, is the most interesting: it takes place in the Eagle and Child (whereas the read-aloud sessions really all took place in Lewis's or Tolkien's rooms) and is well-attended, with perhaps eight or nine Inklings present. Barfield, Lewis, Tolkien, and Dyson are identified by name; Warnie can also be identified (partly by the mustache and partly by the fact he walks Lewis home afterwards).* After Barfield begs off reading anything this time, Tolkien admits to having 'added to his manuscript'. As he gets ready to read, he has the following quick exchange with Dyson:

'Dyson': Ah, no, Tollers, not another bloody elf!
'Tolkien': You can cover your ears, if you want"
'Dyson': I may do just that.

Rather than the fraught exchange depicted by some biographers, this re-enactments presents it as good-humored chaff, with the other Inklings chuckling at JRRT's rejoinder. An interesting take on a rather murky episode.


Ironically, the other two highlights are both to be found in the Extras, not in the documentary itself.

(1) reminiscences by three men who actually knew Lewis; a bishop who was a chaplain at Cambridge when Lewis first came, a man whom Lewis gave a tea set to as a wedding present (they show the teacups), and Lewis's literary executor and editor of most of his posthumous works, Walter Hooper.

The bishop is interesting in that he describes Lewis as a v. secretive man, which accords well w. McGrath's recent interpretation (and, as Janice points out, Lewis was secretive for a reason: he had things to hide, first re. Mrs. Moore and later re. Mrs. Gresham). He also mentions one time he disagreed with a point Lewis made and received a withering full-bore oratorical assault that he said was quite bullying -- and, despite which, he knew full well that Lewis was quite wrong in the point he was so emphatically asserting.

The passage with Hooper is interesting both for its length (a full ten minutes) and because Hooper shows Ward the typescript for THE SILVER CHAIR, which I hadn't known survived (and, apparently, in Hooper's possession, rather than in the Bodleian, unless he'd borrowed it for this occasion). He said he now thinks he and others overstated the degree to which Lewis destroyed his own manuscripts, and instead now believes many of them were burned by Major Lewis in the famous bonfire, THE SILVER CHAIR typescript being among the items he (Hooper) carried off that day. Interesting to see the bonfire story has now fully re-surfaced, having been eclipsed for a while in the '80s and '90s.



(2) Ward himself giving his whole theory in one single long (fifteen-minute) exposition. This is the best chance to take it in as a whole and see how it all hangs together, relating each of the seven books to the Ptolemaic body he thinks it corresponds to, and detailing why. Unfortunately the timing was a bit off, so the voice and video were slightly out of sync, but that didn't affect the coherency of his argument. Having listened to the whole, have to say I'm unconvinced (a) that Lewis had such a plan --the Mercury/HORSE AND HIS BOY connections seem particularly weak -- and (b) that it matters if he did.

The theory is ingenious, but I find myself put off by the documentary's focus being on Ward, not Lewis or his works, and also by a statement Ward makes in his book, where he argues that his theory is so compelling that he considers the burden of proof to be on those who disagree with him.** That is, that his theory shd be accepted as true until disproven. That's not the way scholarly research works.

In any case: an interesting documentary, if a bit quirky. I'm surprised it hasn't shown up on The History Channel.

--John R.


*in the later similar session, there's a much younger man behind JRRT who I think is meant to be Young Christopher

**PLANET NARNIA, p. 215: "[This] interpretation seems to me to account for so many things that I would even dare to suggest that the burden of proof now rests with those who would dispute it."

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.

My Newest Publication: Volume 258

So, Thursday a week ago brought a copy of my latest publication to the porch: a reprint of my 2007 Marquette lecture " 'A Kind of Elvish Craft': Tolkien as Literary Craftsman", which had first appeared in TOLKIEN STUDIES volume four [2009]; before that it'd been the 2007 Blackwelder Lecture at Marquette. I'd been surprised and pleased when a few months ago I got a request from Cenegale (formerly Gale) Publishing, the folks who do long series of encyclopedia-sized books like CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM and NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE CRITICISM and TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM,* asking if they cd include a reprint of my piece in their latest volume. This was new territory to me, but after taking advice I said sure, asking for a copy of the volume in question in return. And now, after being backordered for a month or two, here it is: Volume 258 of TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM.

Rather than author-by-author, which had been how volumes by Gale I'd consulted in years past had been organized, this volume has three sections, each devoted to a different literary movement: The Abbey Theatre (p. 1-123), The Confessional School of Poetry (p. 124-203), and The Inklings (p. 205-313), followed by over 150 pages of indexes. My contribution is the concluding essay of the third (Inklings) section; while familiar enough with the Abbey Theatre through my work on Lord Dunsany (whose first plays were produced there, before he had a falling out with Lady Gregory), I confess I had to look up who the 'Confessional School' were -- turns out this is their label for Berryman, Lowell, Plath, Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass (the last of which I'd never heard of before, I'm sorry to say; the rest are all famously manic-depressive).

Since others interested in Tolkien and in the Inklings might want to know what's in this volume (besides my piece, of course), here's a run-down on the contents of their 'Inklings' section:

After an anonymous Introduction (perhaps by series editor Kathy Darrow, or one of her thirteen-person-strong editorial staff) comes a select bibliography of Representative Works by Barfield, Cecil, GKC, Coghill, Dyson, Fox, CSL, WHL, Lindsay, Geo MacD, Mathew, CT, JRRT, Wain, & Ch Wms. The inclusion of Chesterton and MacDonald, neither of whom was ever an Inkling, is explained by their being considered formative influences on the group. It may be significant that in this bibliography of suggested reading Tolkien is represented by just five works (HOBBIT, LotR, Silm, Letters, plus Middle English Vocabulary), far less than CSL (thirteen, including BOXEN) or even Wms (eleven), being about the same as Barfield (six), Cecil (four), and Warnie (five).

Next up come the reprinted essays, as follows:

(1) Gareth Knight, fr. The Magical World of the Inklings (1990) [201–214]

(2) Fredrick & McBride, fr. Women Among the Inklings (2001) [214–230] (including a section on Sayers, 'Not Quite an Inkling")

(3) Diana Pavlac Glyer, Mythlore essay (2007) [230–236]

(4) ibid, fr. The Company They Keep (2007) [236–265]

(5) Walter F. Hartt, "Godly Influences: The Theology of JRRT and CSL", Studies in the Literary Imagination, 1981 [266–270] (L & T as Xians)

(6) Maria Kozyreva, "Chesterton's World in the Mirror of His Poetry", Inklings Jahrbuch, 1996 [270–275]

(7) Rbt W. Maslen, "Towards an Iconography of the Future: CSL and the Scientific Humanists", Inklings Jahrbuch, 2000 [275–285] (which devotes a good deal of space explicating THE DARK TOWER, I was glad to see, since I consider this work overly neglected)

(8) Rolland Hein, "Doors Out and Doors In: The Genuis of Myth", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [285–290]

(9) David L. Neuhouser, "The Role of Mathematics in the Spiritual Journey of Geo. MacD", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [290–297]

(10) Kerry Dearborn, "The Sacrament of the Stranger", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [297–303]

(11) JDR "A Kind of Elvish Craft", from TOLKIEN STUDIES Vol. VI (2009) [303–313].

--I was interested to see that three essays come from the same book, a book I happen to have published a review of a year or two back.*

Finally comes an extremely brief (two-item) list of Further Reading, being a piece by Rachel Falconer ("Rereading Childhood Books: CSL's The Silver Chair") & another by Carl Phelpstead ("Auden and the Inklings: An Alliterative Revival") [313]. Given how impresive Phelpstead's recent TOLKIEN & WALES book looks, I'll have to track down a copy of this latter, which appeared in JEGP back in 2004.

And that's basically it. I'm pleased to see my essay get picked up and reprinted in a new venue, and hope it helps disseminate my argument (Tolkien was a meticulous writer who made every detail count, who used stylistic variations to prompt his readers' creative involvement in his subcreation) to new audiences. We'll see.

--John R.

current reading: THE DIARY OF EDWARD VI, 1547-1553

current audiobook: TOLKIEN & THE GREAT WAR by Jn Garth

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

*as well as, it turns out, less well-known lines like NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE.

**a review which prompted one contributor to write a rebuttal that has since appeared in MYTHLORE; I'd like to write a counter-rebuttal but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Inklings for Sale

So, on a pretty regular basis abebooks.com sends out themed ads for various books available through their site. And today, their theme is Books by the Inklings:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/oxford-tolkien-cs-lewis-eagle-child-literature/inklings.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-h00-inklingVCA-_-01cta&abersp=1

One interesting aspect of this is just whom they consider to be Inklings -- Tolkien and Lewis, of course, as the co-founders and by far most famous members, with Williams and Cecil in the second tier (a lot of Inklings scholars forget how distinguished a scholar Lord David was*). Warnie and some books about the Inklings round out the list -- rather surprisingly there's no Wain here; perhaps they felt his work went too far afield and shd be grouped with the Angry Young Men instead.

Most interestingly of all, they include Roger Lancelyn Green among the Inklings' members, giving him equal billing with Wms and Cecil. I know Doug Anderson has argued that a good case can be made for RLG as an Inkling but I think this may be the first time I've seen it taken as a given. Interesting!

And, in a related note, ABEbooks.com likes to send out monthly announcements of which ten books sold on their site for the most during the previous month. Tolkien ranked on top a few months back; this month, he's #7 behind Fleurs du Mal and Dr. No and Edward Gorey, ahead of JFK and Huxley, with a set of the first-edition LotR:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/RareBooks/james-bond-edward-gorey/most-expensive-aug11.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-C110901-mostexAX-_-01cta&abersp=1

--John R.

current book: PICTURING TOLKIEN

current e-book: book five in the 'Royal Spyness' series by Rhys Bowen

current audiobook: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES [2006] and

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (just started)

*there's a reason he got an Oxford professorship so early. Though he didn't deserve F. R. Leavis's elevation of him into the epitome of all that Leavis thought was wrong with English literature and academia (i.e., that too many people listened to Cecil rather than Leavis).

Turtle Men on the Moon!

So, one of the things that particularly struck me when looking through Major Warnie Lewis's diary for his fifty-day voyage home from Shanghia via America in 1930 was the reading he did over those fifty days. A detailed overview of this wd take another visit to the Wade to pull off, so for now I'll just note that he read an impressive mix of French drama (Moliere), English poetry (Thomson's The Seasons), Victorian novels (re-reading all six books in Trollope's 'Barsetshire' Chronicles), dipped into a borrowed* copy of Wells' Outline of History,** and made his way through a book on English lit. by Drinkwater (which Warnie faulted for overpraising Wordsworth, whom WHL disparages on account of the French daughter). And also, among the rest, what he described as a "Wellsian" romance about turtle-men on the moon, which he thought an inferior production.

Now this interested me, because while we know several of the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, and Warnie) were fond of science fiction, there's v. little record of specific titles and works they read beyond, say, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. So I did a little digging and think I've now identified both work and author: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON by Edmond Hamilton. I'd initially been thrown off by the assumption that, since all the other things the Major mentions reading were books, this 'turtle-men' story must have been published in book form. Instead, it now seems that he was reading an issue of the new Scientifiction magazine AMAZING STORIES,*** founded just four years before (1926) by Hugo Gernsback. I don't know if this is the first direct proof that the Inklings (or at least one among them, and a core member at that****) read AMAZING STORIES, but it's certainly the first such evidence I've come across. And, as such, I thought worth sharing.

As for the story itself, I've located a good synopsis of it available online, thanks to GoogleBooks, which quotes it from Bleiler & Bleiler's SCIENCE FICTION: THE GERNSBACK YEARS: A COMPLETE COVERAGE OF THE GENRE [1998]; see the entry for book #549 on pages 161-162. Here's the link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=PbMdeizaCNcC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=turtle-men+of+the+moon&source=bl&ots=ODucnfGMPI&sig=YtNuFkNbWojl2h5bTrwizSBOflg&hl=en&ei=2dWnTY_bH4T0swOJ3OD5DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=turtle-men%20of%20the%20moon&f=false

I don't think I've ever read a book by Hamilton (who nowadays is better know as Leigh Brackett's husband than in his own right), though I'm sure I must have read some of his comic book work in reprint digests back in the day. I hope to soon remedy that lack, however, as a copy of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON shd now be on its way to me. We'll soon see how it holds up compared with, say, Gernsback's own RALPH 124C1+.

--JDR

current (re)reading: THE LAST HERO [2001] by Terry Pratchett

current audiobook: THE MOONSTONE (still)

*one question I'm still working on is whether most of the books he read during this trip were his own, as seems to be the case, or were borrowed from a ship's library (unlikely, but I'm not well enough informed about whether a passenger ship of the time wd have a misc. assortment of books for passengers to read or not). None of the books he mentions reading seem to be in the CSL Library Collection of books once belonging to CSL, WHL, their parents, & JDL now at the Wade, at least on a cursory check, but many of them are just the sort of books I wd have expected not to have survived in that collection. He does mention visiting the Shanghai Club just before his departure and returning the books he'd borrowed from its library, and shortly afterwards visits the library of the American Club, but apparently not to borrow any books from for the trip.

**v. sensibly reading the sections devoted to topics he knew a lot about, like the War, the era of Louis XIV, and the British colonial far east, and finding him wanting.

***specifically, AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY, Fall 1929 issue

****technically, of course, Warnie was a pre-Inkling at this time, since the group hadn't started meeting yet.

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

P.S.: And just this evening (Sunday Apr. 17th), Janice and I saw not one but two turtles in the lake while out for a walk this afternoon. Haven't seen any in the ten years we've been living in "the Lakes" development (of which Bayview is one of ten or so parts, almost all w. amusingly inappropriate names, like "Bayview" which is not on a bay, or "Cypress Cove" which is not on a cove). Hadn't been going that way on walks for quite a while, not since they cut the mimosa down (that having been my favorite tree in the neighborhood); now I've got a good reason to stretch my legs in that direction again.

Note to self: turtles don't like peanuts, even shelled ones. Good to know.

--JDR

A Proto-Inklings?

So, when I recently mentioned Tolkien and Lewis listening to Wagner together, I was operating off of memory. Going back now and looking it up, I see that I mixed together two separate events, the first of which was Lewis's early interest in Wagner, which included his listening to Wagner on gramophone records (i.e., 78rpms) back in 1912 (Hooper & Green, p.32). The second, and more interesting, is the Lewis-Tolkien-Warnie session of early 1934 which seems to me one of the rare glimpses into the interim steps in what turned out to be the coalescence of the Inklings -- or at least one thread of what came to be The Inklings (Lean's Inklings Club and Tolkien's Coalbiters being two others which played their part).

According to Carpenter's account in THE INKLINGS, as well as the passages from Warnie's diary he based this on, December 1933 found Warnie, who had retired and moved into the Kilns about a year before,* complaining about Tolkien intruding into his quality time with his brother ("Confound Tolkien! I seem to see less and less of J[ack] every day"**). Accordingly, as Carpenter puts it, "Knowing Warnie's feelings, Jack took a great deal of trouble not to leave his brother out of anything and, when Tolkien and he decided to spend an evening reading aloud the libretto of Wagner's Die Walkure, Warnie was asked to join them even though he knew no German and could only take part by using an English translation." (THE INKLINGS pages 55-56).

This is obviously directly based on the March 24th and 26th entries in Warnie's diary, the first of which reads "J and I have been for some time intending to ask Tolkien to dinner with us at the Eastgate and to read the Walkure in J's rooms afterwards."*** The event itself is described in terms which sound v. like Warnie's later write-ups of Inklings evenings: "Tolkien, J, and I met by appointment in College at four o'clock to read the Valkyrie . . . When we had had some tea we started on the play, I reading in English and T and J in German. I think our English version must be the acting version, for it fits the German syllable by syllable -- as a result it was I found very easy to follow the others' parts: I did not need prompting more than a couple times. Coming to it with the idea of an opera libretto in my mind, I got a very agreeable surprise. Even in this rather doggerel version it remains a fine play. We knocked off soon after six and T went home, meeting us again at the Eastgate where we had fried fish and a savoury omlette . . . We then returned to J's rooms and finished our play (and incidentally the best part of a decanter of very inferior whiskey). Arising out of the perplexities of Wotan we had a long and interesting discussion on religion which lasted until about half past eleven when the car called for us. A very enjoyable day."****

I think Carpenter is probably right here, and that by bringing Warnie into what had been their two-man meetings, Tolkien & Lewis essentially had the core of the group established but without the group itself. The timing is key: 'Humphrey' Havard told me that he'd joined the group shortly after his move to Oxford in 1934, and subsequent research bears out the timing of Havard's arrival on the scene and his incorporation into CSL's circle of friends. Among the other early members -- Coghill, Fox, and probably Wrenn -- Havard proved the one who stuck with the group longest, longer than Tolkien himself. More importantly, adding a non-academic like Havard***** would have helped prevent Warnie -- himself a gifted self-taught historian -- from being the odd man out among a gathering of dons.

So, one more piece in the puzzle, to help us get a better glimpse at the overall picture.

--JDR


*Brothers & Friends, p. 95 (entry for Dec. 21st 1932).

**Brothers & Friends, p. 127 (entry for Dec. 4th 1933).

***Brothers & Friends, p. 144 (entry for March 24th 1934). Interestingly enough, this entry reveals that Mrs. Moore had suggested the men meet on a Tuesday ("from her point of view Tuesday would be the best day for us to do it") but that the Tolkiens had other plans, suggesting that the selection of Tuesday as one of the two Inkling meeting days might have been Janie Moore's contribution to the group.

****Brothers & Friends, p. 145-146 (entry for March 26th 1934).

*****Though it's good to remember that Havard, while not an academic, was a learned man, with a background in biochemistry; he was later to spend much of WW II doing medical research to help protect British troops from tropical diseases.