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.

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

Charles Williams' Example for Lewis?

So, despite my not being able to make it to Diana Pavlac-Glyer's talk at the Wade this week

( http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter/news/news.html ),

her ongoing work to assert mutual influences between the Inklings came to mind last week while I was working with the Williams papers. I knew Wms was prolific: he usually came out with several books at year he either edited or wrote, along with a slew of articles and reviews and poems. But the checklists and bibliographies I'd seen don't really convey an idea of the sheer mass of material he produced, or just how quickly he worked. The particular piece I was looking at -- preserved in the form of a seven-page typescript -- his personal archivist Raymond Hunt referred to as a 'weekend job', and believed he cd assign to a specific two-day period in which it was written.* The Wade's Wms holdings includes drafts of novels, multiple drafts of many plays, essays, poems, lecture notes, &c. &c. Here's their listing of over four hundred separate Mss and Tss in their collection:

http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter/collection/Manuscripts/WilliamsMS.pdf

Now, this got me to thinking. Lewis is also remembered as an epically prolific author, but it's often been remarked as curious that he was very slow in getting started. In the first ten years after he became a don, he published only one significant article and one major book. Plus, of course, he researched and wrote his famous lecture series published posthumously as THE DISCARDED IMAGE. It's sometimes been said that at an American university he probably wd have been denied tenure for such a sparse publication record. But that all changed in the late 30s/early 40s (being away from home I can't consult the bibliographies to narrow down the date), after which he became famously productive, issuing a steady stream of articles and books and letters.

Why the change? Well, in as far as anyone has offered an explanation, it's been that somehow his conversion was responsible -- that converting to Xianity lit a fire under him that never went out, and the speed at which he wrote and published was one aspect of this. How do we know, though, that this isn't a case of post hoc prompter hoc? I'd like to suggest another possible stimulus that I think is equally plausible: what if the example of Charles Williams played a role? One of the strongest influences on a writer is the example of other writers. Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Greeves -- the circle of writers the young CSL was most familiar with -- were not particularly productive so far as their publication record went, and often worked on projects for years without getting them published. But Williams, who transferred to Oxford in late 1939 and was in close contact with CSL for the remainder of the war years, wrote quickly and published immediately, exactly as the latter CSL did. I don't think this is the sort of thing that's susceptible to proof, but I'd be interested to see the evidence laid out and see if an interesting pattern may emerge.

--JDR

*Hunt's twenty-volume set of typed transcriptions of Wms' collected works ran to well over three thousand pages -- apparently all in chronological order, as near as he cd get it. Didn't have time this visit, but I'm looking forward to seeing the originals of these next visit.

Wheaton

So, last week I got to spend five days going research at Wheaton. While I always enjoy the chance to visit the Wade Collection, I find that I get a lot more done when I'm here for an extended trip (several days in a row) than when I have a sequence of single-day visits, even if they add up to the same number of hours with the material. I think the longer trips enable me to hit some kind of critical mass, just as I get a lot done writing or editing when I concentrate entirely on project rather than try to fit it in with a few hours a night.

This trip was also unusual for me in that while I spent some time (roughly half the visit) with Tolkien-related projects -- specifically, looking some things up in the Clyde Kilby archives, which turn out to be full of gems -- this marked the first time I've worked with the Charles Williams papers. Their archive of Williams letters and manuscripts is vast. I was looking for an item by Williams that was reported lost in 1946 which I'd heard might still survive. Not only does it turn out to survive, but in at least three separate typescripts, which I collated together. Interesting stuff. I was also interested to discover that in his letters Williams' tone is completely different depending on whether he's writing to a man (in which case he's relatively straightforward) or a woman (in which he's flirty, playful, commanding, flattering, intensely personal). I also spent some time on various smaller projects, like the ongoing effort to prove that C. S. Lewis wrote J. R. R. T.'s TIMES obituary, and briefly following up on various small points that arose while working on other things. I did not, alas, have a chance to get any further on THE DARK TOWER or the Major's diaries, the chief focus of last year's visit, which will have to stay in abeyance until next year's visit.*

Another great thing about the visit was not just getting to see the great folks at the Wade but managing a get-together with my friend Darrell Martin, who I hadn't seen in so many years that we cdn't exactly work out when the last time had been; certainly more than a decade and possibly as long ago as the last X-Con I attended (in 1991 in Milwaukee, just before Taum died). And I got to attend a lecture at the Wade by Matthew Dickerson, co-author (w. Jonathan Evans, who wrote a great article on Tolkien's dragons) of a book on Tolkien and ecology that I'd just begun reading. Diana Pavlac will be there next week, but afraid the timing just doesn't work out for that one for me. Still, a great trip full of interesting discoveries.

And now I'm looking forward to a day at Marquette this coming week.

--JDR

current reading: ENTS ELVES & ERIADOR

current anime: THE MELANCHOLY OF HARUHI SUZUMIYA, season two

*about the only disappointment, other than that every research trip turns out to be just a little too short when it comes time to down tools on the final day, was that the Wheaton College bookstore's Tolkien shelf had shrunk to almost nothing. It's usually worth a visit, because they carry a wide array of books by and about the seven authors in the Wade Collection. This time, however, while they had a great selection of books by and about Lewis, as usual, they had only five books by Tolkien. By contrast, they had copies of four different editions of G. K. Chesterton's ORTHODOXY, which I'd say was at least three too many. -- JDR

Barfield (and Hooper) Come to the Wade

So, one of the things I found out about during my recent visit to the Wade is that they'll soon be hosting two special speakers: Owen Barfield ('Owen Jr', grandson of the author) and Walter Hooper.

Owen Jr.'s talk about his grandfather's life and works will be at the Wade tomorrow evening (Tuesday October 6th, at seven o'clock). I missed a similar talk in Oxford in 2007, having arrived from Heathrow just shortly before the event started and being too jet-lagged from transcontinental + transatlantic travel to take in a lecture that same evening. A bad call on my part, I've since concluded. Now I miss it again by just a week and a day. Ah well; someday. In the meantime, for anyone interested in the most overlooked of all the major Inklings, this is an event you shd take the extra effort to attend if at all possible.

Nor is that all: on the 26th -- that is, three weeks from today -- Fr. Hooper will be speaking about his forty-six years spent editing C. S. Lewis. I suspect this will be similar to the talk I got to hear him give on the same topic the last day I was in England (in fact, the evening that I shd have spent packing), wh. I enjoyed v. much. There aren't many people left who knew Lewis, and Hooper knows more about him than any other person living, so this shd be quite an event.

Here's the official announcement from the Wade Center website:

http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter/news/news.html

And for those who don't know enough about Barfield yet, here's the official website, which shows their progress so far in their welcome campaign to get all of OB's books back in print:*

http://www.owenbarfield.org/

--John R.

*my own two small recent contributions to Barfieldology are having provided the foreword to EAGER SPRING (having years ago provided the executors with a copy of the text itself) and writing a review of Simon Blaxland de Lange's biography of OB. I still long for the day when ENGLISH PEOPLE sees print, and still hope to get my essay on the Burgeon trilogy (THIS EVER DIVERSE PAIR, WORLDS APART, & UNANCESTRAL VOICE) written up and published ('The Importance of Being Burgeon'). --JDR