The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (75 page)

Still, publishing triumphs helped offset the encroaching gloom.
The Lord of the Rings
was selling extremely well, so much so that Stanley Unwin declared it the most important and successful book in his firm’s history. In October 1961, Tolkien’s aunt, Jane Neave, wrote to him suggesting that he produce a small book about Tom Bombadil; he seized on the idea and the volume appeared on November 22, 1962, as
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book
, with illustrations by Pauline Baynes. Tolkien thought it “a very pretty book.” He praised the illustrations, telling Baynes that “I do not think that they could have been more after my own heart” (although during production he had objected to her drawing of a dragon, telling Rayner Unwin that the figure itself was “excellent” but complaining that “of course no dragon, however decrepit would lie with his head away from the entrance”). Alfred Duggan, reviewing it in
The Times Literary Supplement
, found the verses “ingenious” but too alike with their “hurrying rhythm and a fondness for feminine endings.” The poet Anthony Thwaite, writing in
The Listener
, by contrast, called the book “something close to genius,” praising the same technique that Duggan derided, and declaring that it had made a convert of him. Tolkien was pleased with both reviews—he had anticipated only contempt from the literary establishment—but by now his attention was on another, even happier literary event: the appearance of a Festschrift in his honor, entitled
English and Mediaeval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday
, prepared in secret by C. L. Wrenn and Norman Davis, with contributions by several Inklings (Lewis, Coghill, Bennett) and many other friends and colleagues. Tolkien received the book at a Merton College celebration on December 5. To crown this fecund autumn, the Early English Text Society published, in conjunction with the release of the Festschrift, Tolkien’s long delayed edition of the
Ancrene Wisse
. The book received little or no attention in the popular press, but Arne Zettersten, a Swedish medievalist and friend of Tolkien, had kind words for it in a 1966 issue of the professional journal
English Studies
, and it has served since as the basis for the only scholarly concordance of this important Christian anchoretic text.

That Tolkien’s major contribution to Christian scholarship appeared at this late stage in his life was felicitous, for old age and its cargo of worries had driven him to renewed reflection upon his faith. He continued to explain to readers the veiled place of Catholicism in
The Lord of the Rings
and to puzzle out its role in
The Silmarillion
. During this period, he wrote his most explicit statement of religious belief, a messy tangle of theology, history, memoir, apology, political invective, and paternal love, sent as a letter to his son Michael, who had recently told his father that he had been suffering from depression and “sagging faith.” Michael’s depression may have been occasioned by the shell shock he had suffered during World War II; even so, low spirits, Tolkien advises his son, are “an occupational affliction” among those, like Michael, who teach school and endemic among those Michael’s age (forty-three), just old enough to realize the hypocrisy that infects all institutions. Recalling his own experiences, he rails against administrative shortsightedness, against being forced to teach what one does not love, against professionals in school and church who dishonor their calling out of exhaustion, insincerity, and greed. However, he assures Michael, “men’s hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.”

After this prolonged outburst with its faintly cheering coda, Tolkien turns to what he perceives as Michael’s deeper problem, his crisis of faith. He begins with superbly crafted apothegms of considerable psychological penetration: “Faith is an act of will inspired by love”; “‘scandal’ at most is an occasion of temptation—as indecency is to lust, which it does not make but arouses.” Michael’s faith, it seems, had fallen victim to the scandals of sinful clergy. As readers will surely note, this is a long-standing problem, perhaps never to be resolved, and Tolkien recounts his own suffering at the hands of “stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests.” But, he adds, this is scarcely reason to leave the Church, a move that would mean turning one’s back on Jesus: an inconceivable act. He echoes Lewis’s lunatic/liar/Lord trilemma, arguing that either Jesus is who he claimed to be, or he is a “demented megalomaniac.” The correct choice he considers obvious; in any event, no one with critical intelligence will swallow the canards that Jesus never existed or that his sayings were forged by others.

How, then, can one shore up one’s faith? Through Holy Communion. The core of this remarkable letter is a sustained paean to the Eucharist. Tolkien tells his son that he “fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning—and by the mercy of god never have fallen out again.” He urges frequent communion (he himself communicated daily whenever possible), preferably in difficult or distracting circumstances: “Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd”; it is the Eucharistic miracle that matters, not its setting. He refers to “the greatest reform of our time,” by which he means Pope Pius X’s recommendation of daily communion as the path to personal and societal salvation. The Eucharist is the center of the Church, of the faith, of the hope of all believers; Tolkien is Roman Catholic because Rome has always safeguarded the Eucharist, scrupulously abiding by Jesus’ last command to Peter, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:16–17).

Rarely has Tolkien been so impassioned or personal. The stakes are high: he is fighting for his son’s soul. Having presented his case, he admits that “this is rather an alarming and rambling disquisition to write! It is not meant to be a sermon!” But alarm, if such he imparted, surely originated in his numerous personal confessions, not his homiletics. The letter is riddled with admissions: He is “an ignorant man, but also a lonely one.” He nearly abandoned God; he is a bad parent: “I brought you all up ill and talked to you too little…” He casts all this in biblical terms, as “one who came up out of Egypt.” He concludes these revelations with a cri de coeur that God may heal his defects “and that none of you shall ever cease to cry
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini
.” These twin prayers, for himself and for his children, say much: what had begun as a letter of assistance to his child ends as a plea to God for mercy on himself and all his flesh. His sorrow, bitterness, and depression nearly take command, nearly overwhelm the beautiful theology, diseased briars choking the rose. One wonders what Michael made of this epistle.

The Clerk’s Tale

Lewis responded to Joy’s death as one might expect: he grieved, he comforted his stepchildren, he notified Joy’s few friends and family of her passing—and he wrote a book.
A Grief Observed
stands apart from Lewis’s other works: it is a raw, choppy assemblage of about 120 jottings, ranging from a line to a page or more, largely stripped of literary effects, tracking the contours of his grief over the first few weeks of bereavement. The text was almost complete by early September, three months after Joy’s demise, when Roger Lancelyn Green perused it during a visit to the Kilns. Lewis, realizing the work was sui generis, decided to publish it under a pseudonym and settled on Dimidius, Latin for “halved.” When he turned in the manuscript to Faber & Faber, however, T. S. Eliot and others at the firm guessed the author’s identity and suggested that a “plausible English pseudonym” might make a better disguise. Lewis concurred and settled upon N. W. Clerk—N. W. for Nat Whilk (“I know not who”), the pen name he had used in the past, and Clerk for scholar.

Walter Hooper believes
A Grief Observed
was “not written with publication in mind,” but another view is possible. Near the book’s end, Lewis explains that he wrote it for two reasons: as “a defence against total collapse, a safety-valve,” and to “describe a
state
; make a map of sorrow.” The therapeutic motive, a private concern, accords with Hooper’s evaluation, but it is difficult to imagine that Lewis, born to communicate, would chart sorrow in all its shades and not wish to pass his discoveries on to others, especially as he saw his discoveries as terra incognita. Just eight days after Joy’s death, he wrote Katharine and Austin Farrer that “there are a lot of things about sorrow which no one (least off all the tragedians) had told me. I never dreamed that, in between the moments of acute suffering, it wd. be so like somnambulism or like being slightly drunk. Nor, physically, often so like fear.” Moreover,
Grief
possesses qualities that suggest considerable shaping on Lewis’s part. Granted, it displays the fragmentation and staccato of an unplanned text, and we know that its length, at least, was not predesigned but determined by how much Lewis could squeeze into four small notebooks he found lying around the Kilns. Nonetheless, the book follows a clear trajectory, from undigested shock and confusion at the outset to conditional acceptance at the end, and it concludes with a poignant quotation from Dante,
“Poi si tornò all’eterna fontana”
(then turned again to the eternal fountain—
Paradiso
XXXI), marking the instant when Beatrice—and thus Joy, Lewis’s Beatrice—departs her lover to return to heaven. This ending is not only a radiant tribute to Joy but also, inter alia, an homage to Charles Williams; it is just the sort of rhetorical flourish at which Lewis excelled—when addressing others.

Lewis divides
Grief
into four sections, each marking a stage in the process of his grieving for “H” (Helen, Joy’s first name). In the first section, Lewis’s self-censoring mechanism has broken down, ravaged by his loss, and what we get is undiluted anger, misery, self-pity, and doubts about God, along with flashes of the old evangelist (“For those few years H. and I feasted on love … If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in him”). In the second section, self-criticism returns, and Lewis discovers that his jottings to date, focused on his reactions to H’s death rather than H herself, “appall” him. Can he be thinking of the real H, or only of her remembered, distorted image? Her reality was “the most precious gift” of his marriage, and he prays piteously for its return. Does she exist anywhere? Where? When? “She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.” He is inconsolable, and God seems to be the “Cosmic Sadist.” In part three, the pressure of grief alleviates, just slightly. Lewis still erupts in anger, confusion, and sorrow, but something new happens. He is sleeping better, the weather has improved, and one morning he receives “an instantaneous, unanswerable impression” of H—something almost akin to a meeting. In the fourth and final movement of this symphony of bereavement, genuine hope dawns: “Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum.” He feels called to praise both God and H, “Him as the giver … her as the gift,” each in His or her stark reality “Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H.”

A Grief Observed
was published on September 29, 1961. The novelist Sylva Norman, reviewing it for
The Times Literary Supplement
, praised its “strange, firm magnetism” but hesitated over its religious conclusions (“Religion—reassurance—seems to conquer. But on what basis does the resolution rest?”); otherwise, the book received little notice beyond the Christian press, which, unsurprisingly, admired its courage and honesty. It remains an oddity, unique in Lewis’s oeuvre but not in English letters, for it carries distant echoes, in its personal anguish and resilient devotion, of John Donne’s
Devotions
and Samuel Johnson’s
Prayers and Meditations
.

Lewis published two other books while working on
A Grief Observed
. In September 1960, he released
Studies in Words
, based upon his 1950s university lecture series, “Some Difficult Words,” which traces the etymology of various terms—chief among them being “nature,” “sad
,
” “wit
,
” “free
,
” “sense
,
” “simple
,
” “conscience
,
” “conscious
,
” “world,” and “life”—with a rich cargo of meaning and implication.
Studies
is a minor work, witty, erudite, and rarely read, although Lewis, in his publicity notes for the publisher, suggested that it belonged alongside Barfield’s most popular work,
Poetic Diction
. William Empson applauded the work’s “easy tone” and the author’s “continually interesting” details in the course of an unsigned
TLS
review so convoluted that Lewis judged it “unintelligible.” Few other reviewers—and almost as few book buyers—paid it any attention, and the volume is remembered mostly for Tolkien’s negative reaction, noted above, in his September 12 letter to Christopher.

Against the Vigilants

Lewis also published, in 1960, an article in the Cambridge
Broadsheet
about the characteristic vices of undergraduate literary criticism. These include, he said, favoring radical over time-honored interpretations, lacking a foundation in biblical and classical learning, treating literary texts “as a substitute for religion or philosophy or psychotherapy,” and in all these vices “imitat[ing] that which, in their elders, has far less excuse.” High dudgeon was the inevitable response; an article in
Delta: The Cambridge Literary Magazine
accused Lewis of “Pecksniffian disingenuousness,” “shabby bluff,” and “self-righteousness,” ad hominem remarks to which Lewis fired back:

Do not misunderstand. I am not in the least deprecating your insults; I have enjoyed these twenty years
l’honneur d’etre une cible
and am now pachydermatous. I am not even rebuking your bad manners; I am not Mr. Turveydrop and “gentlemanly deportment” is not a subject I am paid to teach. What shocks me is that students, academics, men of letters, should display what I had thought was an essentially uneducated inability to differentiate between a disputation and a quarrel. The real objection to this sort of thing is that it is all a distraction from the issue. You waste on calling me liar and hypocrite time you ought to have spent on refuting my position.