The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (78 page)

At least one event alleviated Tolkien’s gloom. In May 1964, George Allen & Unwin published
Tree and Leaf
, a compendium of “Leaf by Niggle” and a revised version of “On Fairy-Stories.” Tolkien supplied the cover illustration, a line drawing of the Tree of Amalion with its serpentine truck and ornate leaves, an invention that, he told Rayner Unwin, “crops up regularly at those times when I feel driven to pattern-designing.” Most reviewers praised the work, discerning in its twinned essay-and-tale expressions of the same rich, imaginative worldview that had informed
The Lord of the Rings
. By now, that monumental epic had made its author a small-scale celebrity, leaving him both gratified and irked. Like any writer, he enjoyed being read and praised, but he was troubled by those who borrowed names without permission from his invented cosmos, and he railed against the cross-Channel hydrofoil, christened
Shadowfax
after Gandalf’s great, gray stallion. Still, his budding fame led to amusing anecdotes—some at his own expense—that he retailed with glee. In November 1964, he attended a lecture by Robert Graves (“a remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth,
but
an Ass”) and was introduced to a friendly young woman, with whom he chatted merrily until Graves interrupted to declare, “it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before.” The woman turned out to be Ava Gardner, the world-famous actress, utterly unknown to Tolkien “till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her.”

Money, by contrast, was never a laughing matter. Tolkien was greatly distressed when in 1965 the American science fiction publishing house Ace Books, on technically murky but possibly legal grounds, released an unauthorized version of
The Lord of the Rings
for which Tolkien received no royalties. His official British and American publishers protested loudly, as did the aggrieved author, who appended a note to his American correspondence urging a boycott of the Ace edition. The press soon learned of the controversy and a transcontinental uproar ensued. Tolkien prepared a lightly revised version of the book for copyright purposes, remarking to Rayner Unwin, while making changes, that “my admiration for the tightness of the author’s construction is somewhat increased. The poor fellow (who now seems to me only a remote friend) must have put a lot of work into it.” The revised, authorized version appeared in October as a Ballantine Book paperback, with the following biting statement, signed by Tolkien, on the cover: “This paperback edition, and no other, has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other.” Ace caved in, paid Tolkien a royalty, and ceased reprinting its edition. Some might suggest that Tolkien owed Ace the royalty, for the brouhaha made his fortune, transforming his epic from a literary curiosity into an enormous cause c
é
l
è
bre. Young readers, avid consumers of fantasy, now learned of the trilogy’s existence and devoured it in droves. By 1966, it sat atop the
New York Times
paperback fiction bestseller list.

Meanwhile,
The Silmarillion
languished in utero. Tolkien continued to alter the text, refining its cosmogony and cosmology and bringing the assorted tales into harmony with
The Lord of the Rings
, but the work resisted final revision. Nonetheless, on September 12, 1965, Tolkien wrote to a member of the Tolkien Society of America, describing the book’s state as “confused” but expressing hope—an echo sounding down the decades!—that a portion might be published in 1966. This hope brightened a few months later, albeit briefly, when Clyde S. Kilby, an American professor at Wheaton College (Illinois) who had hosted talks by Barfield and had founded the C. S. Lewis Collection (which would later become the Marion E. Wade Center, devoted to research on Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Barfield, MacDonald, Chesterton, and Sayers), volunteered to assist as needed on
The Silmarillion
. Tolkien accepted gratefully, and Kilby spent most of the following summer in Oxford on a mission of mixed fruits, as Tolkien spurned most of his visitor’s editorial suggestions while basking in his admiration. In the event,
The Silmarillion
continued its prodigious gestation.

On March 22, 1966, Tolkien and Edith marked their golden wedding anniversary with a double celebration at Merton College: a luncheon on March 22 and a dinner the following evening at which the British composer Donald Swann performed, with the singer William Elvin, portions of a song cycle based on
The Lord of the Ring
(the cycle was published in 1967 as
The Road Goes Ever On
). As a follow-up, in mid-September the couple departed on a Mediterranean cruise. This voyage, a second honeymoon considerably more adventurous than the couple’s original weeklong stay in 1916 in Clevendon, a Victorian-era seaside resort, seemed jinxed from the start. Edith fell on board soon after the ship left port, injuring her arthritic leg, and later on, Tolkien developed a throat infection. As a result of these setbacks, the couple rarely left the boat but did arrange to set foot on Asian soil in Izmir, Turkey; Tolkien also managed to attend a Mass at St. Mark’s in Venice. Like Kilby’s visit to Oxford a few months earlier, the Mediterranean tour was a happy occasion that failed to meet expectations. Unadulterated joy, Tolkien was reminded as his life wound down, thrived only within the precincts of the Eucharist. Every human effort, even subcreation, was vulnerable to loss and sorrow.

This lesson suffuses
Smith of Wootton Major
, his last completed work of fiction, published in November 1967. He had begun the novella in late 1964, after receiving an invitation from Pantheon Books in New York to write a preface to a new edition of George MacDonald’s fairy tale, “The Golden Key.” Tolkien accepted the assignment only to discover, upon rereading the story, that he despised its vision of Fa
ë
rie, which was sweeter, thinner, and less numinous than his own (Kilby recalls that during his summer in Oxford, Tolkien “frequently fired verbal cannonades at George MacDonald”). When Tolkien sat down to write his preface, he decided to illustrate the qualities of good fairy fiction by supplying a freshly minted example of his own. Soon this composition so captured him that he jettisoned the preface, which was never completed, and instead produced
Smith of Wootton Major
. The book recounts the adventures of the titular hero, a boy who eats a fairy star hidden in a Great Cake. When the star falls out of his mouth some months later, he fixes it to his forehead. It becomes his passport to Fa
ë
rie, where he wanders at will, meeting a young maiden, the fairy queen in disguise, who dances “on a lawn beside a river bright with lilies” in a scene reminiscent of Edith’s dance for Tolkien in the woods half a century earlier. Through these and other encounters, Smith acquires humility, kindness, and insight, enabling him to make the great sacrifice of bidding farewell to Fa
ë
rie and passing the star on to another deserving young boy.

Smith of Wootton Major
received mixed reviews. The American writer Robert Phelps, in
The New York Times Book Review
, called it “a good tale, dense and engrossing,” but Naomi Mitchison, who had been an early defender of
The Lord of the Rings
, wrote in the
Glasgow Herald
that “Tolkien needs a bigger canvas and harder work on it if one is to become involved and convinced.” The book proved popular with the public, despite widespread disappointment that it was not a tale of the Shire; when Tolkien read the story before publication at Blackfriars, Oxford’s Dominican Hall and Studium, more than eight hundred people showed up in the pouring rain. By now, his name had become a magical lure and anything by him glittered.
Smith
appealed also to many scholars, who ventured a number of fanciful interpretations. Some saw in the hero a likeness to Tolkien, or perhaps to Anodos, MacDonald’s protagonist in
Phantastes
, while others read the story as an apology for the author’s failings as a philologist, or as a Christian allegory (despite Tolkien’s repudiation of that genre), or a fictional valedictory, or even a commentary upon Vatican II. In a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green, Tolkien describes it as “an old man’s book, already weighted with the presage of ‘bereavement.’” With this in mind, Smith’s surrender of the fairy star is the crux of the tale; we must let go of even the most precious things, when our time has come and gone.

The Inklings, too, at least as a corporate entity, had reached its end. A handful of gatherings were held after Lewis’s death, attended by the stalwart few, but without the maestro’s ebullient presence they proved poor pantomimes of the original and soon ceased. From now on, members would meet one another for a beer or lunch or dinner or by chance. Ironically, just as the Inklings dwindled away, the first significant study of the group appeared,
The Precincts of Felicity
(1966) by Charles Moorman, an American English professor, medievalist, and Arthurian scholar. Dubbing his subjects the Oxford Christians, Moorman concentrates on Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers; the last two, he claims, may be usefully located on the “periphery” of the group. This is inaccurate, markedly so in the case of Eliot, but Moorman manages to introduce readers to the Tuesday morning and Thursday night meetings, provides a roster of the chief participants, and, among some wild hazards (predicting, for instance, that Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg would prove a passing fad), accurately foresees that the Inklings may become “in days to come … a movement.”

Warnie, for one, disliked Moorman’s book, as he did all accounts of the Inklings that depicted them as anything more than like-minded fellows raising glasses and voices in joyful fellowship. He called the book “silly,” misread Moorman’s account of literary alliances as suggesting a “group mind” among the Inklings, and found the inclusion of Eliot and Sayers to be, correctly, “frankly absurd.” His negative assessment should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as he was still engulfed in grief and deeply sensitive about his brother’s legacy. Lewis haunted his thoughts, day and night. Just a few days after blasting Moorman, Warnie wrote in his diary of hearing a song that swept him into the past, when he and his brother idled in the shrubbery at Little Lea, smoking cigars and listening to the gramophone; a week after that, he jotted down a dream in which he and Lewis “died at the same instant and found ourselves walking hand in hand in twilight over an immense featureless plain,” until a mysterious force drew them apart, Lewis “holding out both hands to me until the last when he was absorbed into white light which gave out no radiance.”

No radiance
: so it was, so it would be. The world had become a dark, dreary void. Rereading his diary, he stumbled on an old account (from June 1947) of panic at imagining “the empty years” if his brother should die first. “But little did I realize,” he added, in the inescapable gloom of the present, “how empty they were to be.” He fought the sorrow as best he could, even moving out of the Kilns for a time to alleviate his misery. His anguish intensified, and then his body broke down as if rent by grief. He developed terrible insomnia, then a slipped disk, and in 1965 suffered a stroke that impaired his speech and partially paralyzed his right hand. On New Year’s Day 1966, he awoke in the “Hell-hole,” his term for Warneford mental hospital. “The hospital atmosphere is killing me, and I am seriously worried at my mental decay,” he writes. “I often find myself wishing that God would send me another stroke which would carry me off painlessly in my sleep. God help me!”

Warnie’s suffering included continued regret at not having kept a better diary. He was pleased with his histories of France, but he knew that his brother had been the finest thing in his life and still lamented his failure to “Boswellise” him while he could. In partial reparation he wrote a biography of Lewis, on the model of the seventeenth-century French “life and letters” memoir, interspersing brief narrative accounts with letters, diary entries, and poems representing the successive periods of Lewis’s life. The original resides as a 471-page typescript in the archives of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois. Jocelyn Gibb, who acquired the rights to this material for Geoffrey Bles, hired the writer Christopher Derrick to transform the book into a collection of letters, prefaced by a heavily edited version of Warnie’s memoir. When it appeared in this reworked form in 1966, Warnie was livid; he considered Derrick a “busybody” and a “fool” and blamed him (though the decision had actually been Gibb’s) for adding to the collection letters from Lewis to Barfield consisting of “withering discourse on the nothingness of the utterness or some similar topic.”

His French research completed, his memorials to his brother rebuffed or radically altered, Warnie withdrew into a narrow round of bad sleep, meals, naps, television, reading, visits to neighbors, and long bouts of boredom. His brother’s fans interrupted his solitude while imparting no pleasure, and he worried in his diary that “on my death bed—or at any rate the day before—I shall have some verbose American standing over me and lecturing on some little observed significance of J’s work. Oh damn, damn, DAMN!” In 1966, Clyde Kilby came to call, the two became friends—Warnie, whose diary sketches had grown increasingly acerbic, describes Kilby as “that nice type of American … [having] something of the dog which with wagging tail appeals to you to like him”—and together they visited Whipsnade Zoo. But such interruptions were rare; for the most part,
no radiance
ruled the day.

“A Very Lucky Man”