Part 7 (1/2)

Afternoon lawn-mowing. Term begins next week, and proofs of Wales papers have come. Still I am going to continue Ring in every salvable moment.' Tuesday 18 April: I hope to see C.S.L. and Charles W. tomorrow morning and read my next chapter - on the pa.s.sage of the Dead Marshes and the approach to the Gates of Mordor, which I have now practically finished. Term has almost begun: I tutored Miss Salu for an hour. The afternoon was squandered on plumbing (stopping overflow) and cleaning out fowls. They are laying generously (9 again yesterday). Leaves are out: the white-grey of the quince, the grey-green of young apples, the full green of hawthorn, the ta.s.sels of flower even on the sluggard poplars.'

Sunday 23 April: I read my second chapter, Pa.s.sage of the Dead Marshes, to Lewis and Williams on Wed.

morning. It was approved. I have now nearly done a third: Gates of the Land of Shadow. But this story takes me in charge, and I have already taken three chapters over what was meant to be one! And I have neglected too many things to do it. I am just enmeshed in it now, and have to wrench my mind away to tackle exam-paper proofs, and lectures.'

Tuesday 25 April: Gave a poor lecture, saw the Lewises and C.W. (White Horse) for ^ hour; mowed three lawns, and wrote letter to John, and struggled with recalcitrant pa.s.sage in The Ring. At this point I require to know how much later the moon gets-up each night when nearing full, and how to stew a rabbit!'

Thursday 4 May: A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir - and he is holding up the catastrophe by a lot of stuff about the history of Gondor and Rohan. If he goes on much more a lot of him will have to be removed to the appendices - where already some fascinating material on the hobbit Tobacco industry and the Languages of the West have gone.'

Sunday 14 May: 1 did a certain amount of writing yesterday, but was hindered by two things: the need to clear up the study (winch had ; got into the chaos that always indicates literary or philological preoccupation) and attend to business; and trouble with the moon. By which I mean that I found my moons in the crucial days between Frodo's flight and the present situation (arrival at Minas Morgul) were doing impossible things, rising in one part of the country and setting simultaneously in another. Rewriting bits of back chapters took all afternoon!'

Sunday 21 May: I have taken advantage of a bitter cold grey week (in which the lawns have not grown in spite of a little rain) to write: but struck a sticky patch. All that I had sketched or written before proved of little use, as times, motives, etc., have all changed. However at last with v. great labour, and some neglect of other duties, I have now written or nearly written all the matter up to the capture of Frodo in the high pa.s.s on the very brink of Mordor. Now I must go back to the other folk and try to bring things to the final crash with some speed. Do you think Shelob is a good name for a monstrous spider creature? It is of course only She+lob (=spider), but written as one, it seems to be quite noisome.

Wednesday 31 May: I have done no serious writing since Mon. day. Until midday today I was sweating at Section Papers: and toot my MSS. to the Press at 2 p.m. today - the last possible day. Yesterday: lecture - puncture, after fetching fish, so I had to foot it to town and back, and as bike-repairs are impossible I had to squander afternoon in a grimy struggle, which ended at last in my getting tyre off, mending one puncture in inner tube, and gash in outer, and getting thing on again. Io! triumphum!

The Inklings meeting [held the previous Thursday night] was very enjoyable. Hugo was there: rather tired-looking, but reasonably noisy. The chief entertainment was provided by a chapter of Warnie Lewis's book on the times of Louis XIV (very good I thought it); and some excerpts from CS.L.'s Who Goes Home - a book on h.e.l.l, which I suggested should have been called rather Hugo s Home.11 did not get back till after midnight. The rest of my time, barring ch.o.r.es in and out door, has been occupied by (he attempt to bring The Ring to a suitable pause, the capture of Frodo by Orcs in the pa.s.ses of Mordor, before I am obliged to break off by examining. By sitting up all hours, I managed it: and read the last 2 chapters (Shelob's Lair and The Choice of Master Sam-wise) to C.S.L.

on Monday morning. He approved with unusual fervour, and was actually affected to tears by the last chapter, so it seems to be keeping up.'

Book IV of The Lord of the Rings was typed and sent out to Christopher in South Africa. By this time Tolkien was mentally exhausted by his feverish burst of writing. When my weariness has pa.s.sed,' he told Christopher, I shall get on with my story.' But for the tune being he achieved nothing. I am absolutely dry of any inspiration for the Ring,' he wrote in August, and by the end of the year he had done nothing new except draft a synopsis for the remainder of the story. He meditated rewriting and completing The Lost Road', the unfinished story of time-travel that he had begun many years before, and he discussed with Lewis the idea of their collaborating on a book about the nature, function, and origin of Language. But nothing was done about either of these projects, and Lewis, referring some time later to the non-appearance of the book on Language, described Tolkien as *that great but dilatory and unmethodical man'. Dilatory' was not altogether fair, but unmethodical' was often true.

Tolkien made little if any progress on The Lord of the Rings during 1945. On 9 May the war in Europe came to an end. The next day Charles Williams was taken ill. He underwent an operation at an Oxford hospital, but died on 15 May. Even if Williams and Tolkien had not inhabited the same plane of thought, the two men had been good friends, and the loss of Williams was a bitter thing, a symbol that peace would not bring an end to all troubles - something that Tolkien knew only too well. During the war he had said to Christopher: We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring', and now he wrote : The War is not over (and the one that is, or part of it, has largely been lost). But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on; and it is no good growing faint.'

In the autumn of 1945 he became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, and hence a Fellow of Merton College, an inst.i.tution that he found agreeably informal' after Pembroke. A few months later the retirement of David Nichol Smith raised the question of whom to appoint to the Merton Professors.h.i.+p of English Literature.

Tolkien was one of the electors, and he wrote: It ought to be C. S. Lewis, or perhaps Lord David Cecil, but one never knows.' And in the event both these men were pa.s.sed over, and the chair was offered to and accepted by F.

P. Wilson. Though there is no reason to suppose that Tolkien did not support Lewis in the election, the gap between the two friends widened a little after this; or to be more accurate there was a gradual cooling on Tolkien's part. It is impossible to say precisely why. Lewis himself probably did not notice it at first, and when he did he was disturbed and saddened by it Tolkien continued to attend gatherings of the Inklings, as did his son Christopher (who after the war resumed his undergraduate studies at Trinity College); Christopher was first invited to the Inklings to read aloud from The Lord of the Rings, as Lewis alleged he read better than his father, and later he became an Inkling in his own right. But though Tolkien could regularly be seen in the Bird and Baby' on Tuesday-mornings and at Magdalen on Thursday nights, there was not the same intimacy as of old between him and Lewis.

In part the friends.h.i.+p's decay may have been hastened by Lewis's sometimes stringent criticisms of details in The Lord of the Rings, particularly his comments on the poems, which (with the notable exception of the alliterative verses) he tended to dislike. Tolkien was often hurt by Lewis's comments, and he generally ignored them, so that Lewis later remarked of him: No one ever influenced Tolkien - you might as well try to influence a bander-s.n.a.t.c.h.'

In part the increasing coolness on Tolkien's side was probably due to his dislike of Lewis's Narnia' stories for children. In 1949 Lewis began to read the first of them, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, aloud to Tolkien. It was received with a snort of contempt. It really won't do!' Tolkien told Roger Lancelyn Green. I mean to say: Nymphs and their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun!' Nevertheless Lewis completed it, and when it and its successors were published in their turn, Narnia' found as wide and enthusiastic an audience as that which had enjoyed The Hobbit. Yet Tolkien could not find it in his heart to reverse his original judgement. It is sad,' he wrote in 1964, that Narnia and all that part of C.S.L.'s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his.'

Undoubtedly he felt that Lewis had in some ways drawn on Tolkien ideas and stories in the books; and just as he resented Lewis's progress from convert to popular theologian he was perhaps irritated by the fact that the friend and critic who had listened to the tales of Middle-earth had as it were got up from his armchair, gone to the desk, picked up a pen, and had a go' himself. Moreover the sheer number of Lewis's books for children and the almost indecent haste with which they were produced undoubtedly annoyed him. The seven Narnia' stories were written and published in a mere seven years, less than half the period in which The Lord of the Rings gestated. It was another wedge between the two friends, and after 1954 when Lewis was elected to a new chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, and was obliged to spend much of his time away from Oxford, he and Tolkien only met on comparatively rare occasions.

With the end of the war The Hobbit was reprinted, and arrangements were made to publish Farmer Giles of Ham.

In the summer of 1946 Tolkien told Alien & Unwin that he had made a very great effort to finish The Lord of the Rings, but had failed; the truth was that he had scarcely touched it since the late spring of 1944. He declared: I really do hope to have it done before the autumn,' and he did manage to resume work on it in the following weeks.

By the end of the year he told his publishers that he was on the last chapters'. But then he moved house.

The house in Northmoor Road was too big for the family such as it now was, and was too expensive to maintain.

So Tolkien put his name down for a Merton College house, and when one became available in Manor Road near the centre of Oxford he made arrangements to rent it. He, Edith, Christopher, and Priscilla moved in during March 1947; John was by now working as a priest in the Midlands, and Michael, married with an infant son, was a schoolmaster.

Almost immediately Tolkien realised that the new home was unbearably cramped. 3 Manor Road was an ugly brick house, and it was very small. He had no proper study, merely a bed-sitter' in the attic. It was agreed that as soon as Merton could provide a better house, the family would move again. But for the time being it would have to do.

Rayner Unwin, the son of Tolkien's publisher, who as a child had written the report that secured the publication of The Hobbit, was now an undergraduate at Oxford, and had made the acquaintance of Tolkien. In the summer of 1947 Tolkien decided that The Lord of the Rings was sufficiently near completion for him to be shown a typescript of the greater part of the story. After reading it, Rayner reported to his father at Alien & Unwin that it was a weird book but nevertheless a brilliant and gripping story'. He remarked that the struggle between darkness and light made him suspect allegory, and commented: Quite honestly I don't know who is expected to read it: children will miss something of it, but if grown ups will not feel infra dig to read it many will undoubtedly enjoy themselves. He had no doubt at all that the book deserved publication by his father s firm, and he suggested that it would have to be divided into sections, commenting that in this respect Frodo's ring resembled that of the Nibelungs.

Stanley Unwin pa.s.sed these comments to Tolkien. The comparison of his Ring with the Nibelungenlied and Wagner always annoyed Tolkien; he once said: Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased.' Nor, of course, was he pleased by the suggestion of allegory; he replied: Do not let Rayner suspect Allegory'. There is a moral, I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between darkness and light (as he calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals - they each, of course, contain universals. or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such.' However he was on the whole very pleased by Rayner's enthusiasm for the book, and he concluded by saying: The thing is to finish the thing as devised, and then let it be judged.'

Yet even now he did not finish. He revised, niggled, and corrected earlier chapters, spending so much time at it that his colleagues came to regard him as lost to philology. But the final full stop was something he could not yet achieve.

During the summer of 1947 he drafted a revision to The Hobbit which would provide a more satisfactory explanation of Gollum's att.i.tude to the Ring; or rather, an explanation that fitted better with the sequel. When this was written he sent it to Stanley Unwin asking for an opinion on it. Unwin mistakenly a.s.sumed that it was intended for inclusion in the next reprint of The Hobbit without any further discussion on the matter, and he pa.s.sed it directly to his production department. Many months later. Tolkien was astonished to see the revised chapter in print when the page-proofs of the new impression were sent to him.

In the following months The Lord of the Rings at last reached its conclusion. Tolkien recalled .that he actually wept'

when writing the account of the heroes' welcome that is given to the hobbits on the Field of Cormallen. Long ago he had resolved to take the chief protagonists across the sea towards the West at the end of the book, and with the writing of the chapter that describes the setting sail from the Grey Havens the huge ma.n.u.script was nearly complete. Nearly, but not quite. I like tying up loose ends,' Tolkien once said, and he wished to make sure that there were no loose ends in his great story. So he wrote an Epilogue in which Sam Gamgee told his children what happened to each of the princ.i.p.al characters who did not sail West. It ended with Sam listening to the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the sh.o.r.es of Middle-earth'.

And that was the end; but now Tolkien had to revise, again and again, until he was completely satisfied with the entire text, and this took many months. He once said of the book: I don't suppose there are many sentences that have not been niggled over.' Then he typed out a fair copy, balancing his typewriter on his attic bed because there was no room on his desk, and using two finger because he had never learned to type with ten. Not until the autumn of 1949 was it all finished.

Tolkien lent the completed typescript to C. S. Lewis, who replied after reading it: My dear Tollers, Uton herian holbytlas indeed. I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst. Once it really gets under weigh the steady upward slope of grandeur and terror (not unrelieved by green dells, without which it would indeed be intolerable) is almost unequalled in the whole range of narrative art known to me. In two virtues I think it excels: sheer sub-creation - Bombadil, Barrow Wights, Elves, Ents - as if from inexhaustible resources, and construction.

Also in gravitas. No romance can repel the charge of escapism' with such confidence. If it errs, it errs in precisely the opposite direction: all victories of hope deferred and the merciless piling up of odds against the heroes are near to being too painful. And the long coda after the eucatastrophe, whether you intended it or no, has the effect of reminding us that victory is as transitory as conflict, that (as Byron says) there's no sterner moralist than pleasure', and so leaving a final impression of profound melancholy.

_.

Of course this is not the whole story. There are many pa.s.sages I could wish you had written otherwise or omitted altogether. If I include none of my adverse criticisms in this letter that is because you have heard and rejected most of them already (rejected is perhaps too mild a word for your reaction on at least one occasion!) And even if all my objections were just (which is of course unlikely) the faults I think I find could only delay and impair appreciation: the substantial splendour of the tale can carry them all Ubi plura nitent in carmine non ego paucis offendi macuhs. I congratulate you. All the long years you have spent on it are justified.

Yours, Jack Lewis Tolkien himself did not think it was flawless. But he told Stanley Unwin: It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.'

Part Six.

1949-1966: Success

Slamming the gates.

It had taken twelve years to write The Lord of the Rings. By the time that he had finished it, Tolkien was not far from his sixtieth birthday.

Now of course he wanted to see the huge book in print. But he was not sure that he wanted Alien & Unwin to publish it, even though he had discussed it with them while it was being written, and they had encouraged him and shown approval of the ma.n.u.script. For he believed that he had now found someone who would publish it together with The Silmarillion.

Over the years he had become angry with Alien & Unwin for rejecting The Silmarillion in 1937 - though in truth they had not really rejected it at all; Stanley Unwin had merely said that it was not suitable as a sequel to The Hobbit.

And Tolkien had come to believe that it was a case of once rejected, always rejected'. Which was a pity, he thought, because he wanted to publish The Silmarillion. It was possible to say that The Lord of the Rings stood up as an independent story, but since it included obscure references to the earlier mythology it would be much better if the two books could be published together. But most of all he wanted to find an audience for the earlier book, and this seemed the ideal, perhaps the only, opportunity. So when Milton Waldman from the publis.h.i.+ng house of Collins showed an interest in publis.h.i.+ng both works, Tolkien was strongly inclined to abandon Alien & Unwin and join forces with him.

Waldman, a Catholic, had been introduced to Tolkien by Gervase Mathew, a scholar and Dominican priest who often attended meetings of the Inklings. When Waldman learnt that Tolkien had completed a lengthy sequel to that very successful book The Hobbit he expressed interest, and late in 1949 Tolkien sent him a bulky ma.n.u.script. But it was not The Lord of the Rings; it was The Silmarillion. The earlier mythological work, begun in 1917 as The Book of Lost Tales', was still incomplete, but Tolkien had begun work on it again while he was finis.h.i.+ng The Lord of the Rings, and it was in a sufficiently ordered state for Waldman to read it. It was like nothing else Waldman had ever seen: a strange archaically-worded tale of elves, evil powers, and heroism. Some of it was typed, but much was in finely-lettered ma.n.u.script. Waldman told Tolkien that he thought it was remarkable, and he said that he wanted to publish it - providing Tolkien could finish it. Tolkien was delighted. Waldman had pa.s.sed the first test: he had (provisionally) accepted The Silmarillion. He was invited down to Oxford by Tolkien, and was handed the ma.n.u.script of The Lord of the Rings. He took it on holiday and began to read it.

By the beginning of January 1950 he had almost finished it, and again he told Tolkien that he was delighted. It is a real work of creation,' he wrote, although he added that the length of the book worried him. But he was very hopeful that Collins would be able to put it into print. Indeed they were in a good position to do so. Most publishers, including Alien & Unwin, had been desperately short of paper since the war; however, Collins were not simply publishers but were also stationers, diary manufacturers, and printers, so they had a far greater allowance of paper than most firms. And as to the commercial viability of Tolkien's lengthy mythological stories, the company's chairman William Collins had already told Waldman that he would be happy to publish any fiction by the author of The Hob-bit. In fact it was really the lucrative Hobbit that Collins wanted to acquire; while Tolkien, unhappy with the first post-war reprint of The Hobbit which had (for economy reasons) been shorn of its coloured plates, told Waldman that he would be happy to see it bought from Alien & Unwin and reissued according to his original intentions. He was also cross with Alien & Unwin for what he considered to be inadequate publicity for Farmer Giles of Ham, and he believed that Collins would be better at selling his books. So all seemed set fair for a working partners.h.i.+p between Tolkien and Collins.

There was, however, one point which Waldman wished to clear up. I take it,' he wrote to Tolkien, that you have no commitment either moral or legal to Alien & Unwin.' Tolkien replied: I believe myself to have no legal obligation.

There was a clause in the contract for The Hobbit providing for a two months* consideration of my next book. That has been satisfied by (a) Stanley Unwin's subsequent rejection of The Silmarillion and (b) by Farmer Giles. But I have had friendly personal relations with Stanley U. and especially with his second son Rayner. If all this const.i.tutes a moral obligation, then I am under one. However, I shall certainly try to extricate myself, or at least The Silmarillion and all its kin, from the dilatory coils of A. and U. if I can - in a friendly fas.h.i.+on if possible.'

Tolkien had in fact worked himself into a state of mind in which he considered Alien & Unwin to be if not an enemy, then at least a very unreliable ally, while Collins seemed to represent all that he hoped for. The real position was much more complex, as events were to prove.

In February 1950 Tolkien wrote to Alien & Unwin to say that The Lord of the Rings was finished. But he did not exactly encourage them to show an interest. My work has escaped from my control,' he told them, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and rather terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion. Ridiculous and tiresome as you may think me, I want to publish them both - The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. That is what I should like. Or I will let it all be. I cannot contemplate any drastic re-writing or compression. But I shall not have any just grievance (nor shall I be dreadfully surprised) if you decline so obviously unprofitable a proposition.'