Laura Miller (28 page)

To his lasting astonishment, Tolkien’s “private and beloved nonsense” (as he called it), when unleashed upon the world, became immensely popular. His complete conviction in his own creation — one of the most comprehensive and steadfast cases of authorial conviction known to literature — was transmitted to many of his readers. They set about studying and speaking his languages and designing all sorts of time-consuming ancillary versions of Middle-earth, games like Dungeons and Dragons or gatherings where people dressed up like wizards or hobbits. He had created a new world; they packed their bags and moved in. Tolkien had a term for the practice of inventing worlds: “sub-creation.” It was, he believed, in the construction of consistent, believable alternate realities that human beings paid the highest tribute to their Creator — by imitating him. Eventually, for the would-be denizens of Middle-earth, the professor himself became not unlike a god.

Tolkien’s books were not among my own childhood favorites. With the vague notion that it was esoteric and dense, I put off attempting
The Fellowship of the Ring
until I was almost ready to leave for college. Even
The Hobbit
had, among owlish eleven-year-olds, a reputation for being a “hard” book;
The Lord of the Rings
was considered an intellectual Everest. I tried
The Hobbit
too soon, attempting it a couple of times before giving up at age eight or so. The copy we had lying around the house (presumably my father’s) was a small, thick drugstore paperback, and its tiny type, combined with the story’s uninspiringly middle-aged hero and all those odd names, contributed to make the story seem stuffy and impenetrable. By the time I acquired the patience for it, I was embarked on a jag of reading plays: Shakespeare, Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and (because my father had a shelf of these) George Bernard Shaw.

Besides, I much preferred fantasies whose main characters were children from this world. Yet even taking that into account, my own resistance to Middle-earth puzzles me. I loved Mr. Tumnus, yet somehow didn’t recognize that Bilbo Baggins, with his cozily appointed hole, was the same type (and probably an inspiration for Tumnus, I now realize). I had trouble, I think, with
The Hobbit
’s longish passages of description. I couldn’t visualize any of these places, and although Tolkien was even more devoted to the natural world than Lewis, his style was less lyrical and he didn’t have Lewis’s knack for suffusing scenery with human emotions. He wouldn’t have wanted to, since he thought human beings already got far too much attention as it was. That was the nub of his objection to drama and to those critics whose taste ran toward “dramatic” fiction: they are, he wrote, “likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.”

Just before leaving home, however, I finally tackled
The Lord of the Rings,
burning through it over the course of a summer. (It is the perfect long book to read before you set off on an ambitious and incomprehensible adventure.) I approached it then with a diligence that now strikes me as bizarre; it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I was able to read it for pure, escapist pleasure. By that point, I recognized that, much as I liked it, Tolkien’s freakishly prodigious powers of invention could not supply the book with what four years of studying English literature had led me to expect from a great novel. I relished
The Lord of the Rings,
and have reread it several times since then. I awaited each installment of Peter Jackson’s three-part film version with excitement and even delved into the “mythological” texts collected in
The Silmarillion
— the province, really, of the hardcore fan, the geek. But by the time I left college I had read
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
and
Absalom, Absalom!
and
Crime and Punishment
— to name just three books with related themes — and knew they sounded depths that Tolkien never touched.

This is a delicate subject. Tolkien has many, many devotees who fly into a fury when anyone suggests that he is not, as Tom Shippey put it in the subtitle to his book on Tolkien, the “Author of the Century.” Long stretches of Shippey’s text are given over to sniping at Tolkien’s less appreciative reviewers. The archenemy, the Sauron of the literary press in the eyes of Tolkien’s champions, is the late American critic Edmund Wilson, who dismissed
The Lord of the Rings
as “juvenile trash.” This, understandably, rankles the faithful, and whenever they encounter any objection like it, they rise to Tolkien’s defense. Their counterarguments usually involve testy lectures on the unparalleled complexity, consistency, and thoroughness of Tolkien’s imaginary world. He invented entire
languages,
for crying out loud: what contemporary novelist, however gifted, had done — or could do — that?

This reasoning never succeeds in winning over critics and readers who just don’t have a taste for such things, the kind of people for whom Middle-earth looks like nothing more than the biggest model-railroad setup of all time. To the contrary: For those with an allergy to the fantasy genre, all this talk of the vastness of Tolkien’s invented world proves that his fans don’t really understand what makes literature
literature;
they think it’s a matter of the quantity, rather than the quality, of invention.

Philip Pullman, while best known for his critique of Lewis, takes an even dimmer view of Tolkien on this count. Having concocted his own alternate universe in which to set His Dark Materials, he finds himself bemused by readers who want to explore it. “This is a particular kind of interest that I’ve never had,” he told me, “and it’s not a literary interest. I could never care less how many miles Middle-earth is from the Shire or whatever it is, or what’s the past participle of a certain word in Klingon.” When readers ask for explanations of the finer points of his imaginary cosmology, he’s flummoxed. “I haven’t got an answer because I’m not interested. It doesn’t matter. What I’m interested in is telling a story. The world is there for me to tell a story in, not for its own sake.”

Several decades of inept, derivative fantasy novels and the nerdy reputation of Tolkien fandom have fortified the ranks of Tolkien naysayers. A lot of them find the whole Middle-earth ambience icky and a little sad. (I have a friend who refuses flat-out to read anything involving elves.) Tolkien has had many admirers of considerable intellectual stature — Auden was his great champion in the press, and the novelist Iris Murdoch sent him fan mail — but this, too, doesn’t go very far in persuading other intelligent people who can’t abide his books. Murdoch perhaps chose the wisest course when her husband, the Oxford professor John Bayley, would demand to know how she could be so enthralled by books that were so “fantastically badly written”: she’d stare at him in amazement and insist that she didn’t know
what
he was talking about.

Lewis and Tolkien certainly felt that they were surrounded by hostile forces. Explaining his own love of “fairy tales” may not have been as central a project for Lewis as was defending the faith, but he gave the cause plenty of energy all the same. Tolkien, too, attempted an apologia, although criticism was really not his forte. His essay “On Fairy Stories,” apart from introducing the concept of “sub-creation,” isn’t much more developed than Lewis’s own writings on the topic — just harder to follow; Tolkien’s expository writing has none of Lewis’s limpid clarity. “I am not a critic,” he once wrote to Lewis, and “On Fairy Stories” is evidence that he understood the limits of his own talents very well. He wrote it in part because he felt that he’d been “unnaturally galvanized” into the critical role during all the time he’d spent with Lewis and “the brotherhood.”

“On Fairy Stories” emerged in large part from the long conversations the two friends had in Lewis’s rooms. Lewis had a fathomless appetite for informal debate, the honing and teasing out of philosophical positions and arguments. He had, remember, aspired to a fellowship in philosophy before settling for English. It was via that late-night talk with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in 1931 that he’d converted (or at least that’s what he chose to believe), and the arguments that convinced him were related to ideas that he and Tolkien shared about the merit of fairy tales.

Lewis had been leaning back toward Christianity for a while, but he needed someone to help him dismantle the intellectual apparatus he’d constructed, years earlier, to justify his agnosticism; he was too stubborn, and too convinced of his own rationality, to toss all that away without a fight. Tolkien handed him the concept that did the trick, an idea that in one fell swoop redeemed his lifelong enthusiasm for pagan legends and conclusively refuted the naysayers who accused the two of them of playing about with a lot of childish moonshine.

Tolkien persuaded Lewis that the stories he’d thrilled to all his life — about sacrificed and reborn gods like Balder or Dionysus — were really like echoes moving backward and sideways and sometimes even forward in time, reverberations of the one occasion when God actually sacrificed himself for mankind. The other stories, made by men, weren’t “lies” (or, as Lewis liked to call them, “lies breathed through silver”); they were shadows of the single instance when the myth “really happened.” People had kept on inventing such shadows, conjuring up imaginary worlds, because human beings were made in the image of a God who was above all a creator, an artist. With this in mind, Lewis could believe in Christ as the Son of God and not give up the other myths he loved so much — the fairy tales, the epics, the “northernness.” Those stories, like Middle-earth itself, were not “real,” but they were nevertheless “true.” They were reflections of the one and only myth that had actually unfolded in history, the one instance when the eternal, transcendent truth of God and the fallen world of reality had been one and the same.

Chapter Twenty

The Second Love

N
ot long after Lewis had that momentous conversation with Tolkien and Dyson on Addison’s Walk, Tolkien wrote a poem entitled “Mythopoeia,” putting into verse his conviction that creating “mythic” art was a more authentic means of pursuing truth than the “dusty path” of science and progress. The poem is addressed from “Philomythus” (“Myth lover” — Tolkien) to “Misomythus” (“Myth hater” — Lewis), but what it has to say is less revealing than the fact that it was written at all. Why write a poem arguing points with a man you’ve just spent hours talking to directly, a friend you speak to at least once (and usually several times) a week?

The practice of poetic conversation between close friends reached its zenith with the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, and with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in particular. Some of their most famous poems were extensions of their conversations; the autobiographical impulse of the early Romantics often transformed poetry into a higher form of letter. Wordsworth’s “A Complaint,” for example, written in 1806, is just that, a protest against “a change in the manner of a friend,” after Coleridge returned from a long journey withdrawn and preoccupied; Coleridge’s “To William Wordsworth,” written not long afterward, voices his renewed awe at his friend’s gifts and his own fears of artistic inadequacy. Although Tolkien had very little interest in “modern” (i.e., post-Chaucerian) poetry, and had remained impervious to the charms of Keats despite the best efforts of one of his old school friends, he could hardly help soaking up at least a little of the late-Victorian notion of the poet’s life, epitomized by the Romantics.

As Paris in the twenties was to young writers and other bohemians of the late twentieth century, so were Romantic friendships like that between Wordsworth and Coleridge to literary men from Lewis and Tolkien’s generation. The Romantics provided a model for a certain kind of relationship (and by extension, community) based on shared creative dreams and the desire to get beyond conventional manners and roles. As often happens with all-pervading cultural fantasies, even if you’re too embarrassed, too modest, or even too cynical to invoke the model openly, it’s still hard to escape it entirely. Writing is a lonely profession, especially when you feel out of step with your time, whether you believe you’re ahead of it (as Wordsworth and Coleridge did) or behind it (Tolkien and Lewis). The later Romantics — Keats, Shelley, and Byron — may have racked up more dramatic, glamorous histories than Wordsworth and Coleridge, but none of them could claim a more consuming, fertile, or tempestuous collaboration. In their heyday, these two friends managed to make writing an almost communal activity.

They met in 1795, and for a little less than a decade they were united in an effort to revolutionize English poetry. At the peak of their friendship, Coleridge and Wordsworth worked side by side at the same table in various rural cottages throughout England, but especially in Coleridge’s cottage in Somerset. They read their work aloud to each other, exchanged criticism, and even contributed lines or entire stanzas to each other’s poems. The foundation of their bond was Coleridge’s certitude that in Wordsworth he had found the consummate literary genius of their time, the man destined to write a long, comprehensive, philosophical poem that would champion a new way of life and in doing so change the world. With Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, and a rotating selection of sympathetic friends, the two men went on epic walks through the countryside, fervently talking of ideas and poetry and opening their hearts and minds to the natural world in search of the same emotional and spiritual transport that, a hundred years later, Lewis would name Joy.

While their talents weren’t of the caliber of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s, Lewis and Tolkien were as susceptible to this template of literary friendship as anyone; both certainly had thought of themselves as poets rather than novelists in their youth. Furthermore, Lewis had been calling himself a “Romantic” since long before he met Tolkien. He had devoured the poetry of Shelley and Keats as a boy. After pooh-poohing Wordsworth through his youth, Lewis came to admire and identify with the poet in his twenties; when asked late in life to list the ten books that had most influenced him, Lewis included
The Prelude,
Wordsworth’s epic, autobiographical poem (addressed, naturally, to Coleridge).