The Inklings kept no minute-book, so there is no full record of the proceedings during Thursday nights in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen. It might easily have been otherwise, for Warnie Lewis was a good diarist and could have provided a detailed account. ‘I would have played Boswell on those Thursday evenings,’ he said regretfully many years later, ‘but as it is, I am afraid that my diary contains only the scantiest material for reconstructing an Inklings.’
On the other hand Jack Lewis’s letters to his brother during the first months of the war, when Warnie was serving abroad, do record quite a lot of what went on; while later in the war Tolkien wrote detailed diary-letters to this third son Christopher who was with the R.A.F., and these letters too record something of what happened at the Inklings. So from these, from the diaries that Warnie Lewis kept (they were not, in fact, so very scanty about the Inklings) and from the reminiscences of the people who attended on Thursday nights, it is possible to get some idea of the kind of thing that happened.
One way to convey the atmosphere of an Inklings evening is to describe an imaginary meeting. What follows is an artificial reconstruction, and entirely imaginary in that it is not based on any one particular evening. On the other hand the subjects of conversation are the kind of things that the Inklings discussed, while the remarks of the various people present are taken from their writings, both published and unpublished, which have been freely adapted to suit the context.1 So while this must not be taken as an accurate record, it may perhaps catch rather more of the flavour of those Thursday evenings than any purely factual account could do. More, but not all; for no reconstruction can do more than hint at what the real thing was like.
*
Considering how fine a building they are in, Lewis’s rooms are rather bleak. The effect is as if a school or some other institution had taken over a fine country house, for his plain (and in some cases downright shabby) furniture simply does not come up to the standard of the eighteenth-century panelling, the broad sash windows, and the high ceilings.
The main sitting-room is large, and though certainly not dirty it is not particularly clean. Lewis’s ‘scout’, the college servant responsible for the rooms on this staircase, only has time to give it a quick flip of the duster early in the morning; and as for Lewis himself, he never bothers with ashtrays but flicks his cigarette ash (he smokes cigarettes as much as a pipe) on to the carpet wherever he happens to be standing or sitting. He even absurdly maintains that ash is good for carpets. As for chairs – there are several shabbily comfortable armchairs and a big Chesterfield sofa in the middle of the room – their loose covers are never cleaned, nor has it ever occurred to Lewis that they ought to be. Consequently their present shade of grey may or may not bear some relation to their original colour.
Apart from the chairs, there is not much furniture in the room. A plain table stands behind the Chesterfield. It was never a very good table; long ago when Lewis first moved into these rooms, his brother Warnie noticed that Jack had chosen the furniture just as he chose his clothes – by walking into a shop and taking the first thing that he was offered. The table now bears the scars of twenty years’ ruthless use: ink stains, cigarette burns, and ring-shaped marks, the larger of which come from the beer jug that often stands here, and the smaller from ink bottles. Across the room are bookshelves, and (like the table) they are very plain and rather shabby; nor are the books themselves much to look at. Long before, in his adolescent days, Lewis and his friend Arthur Greeves were avid collectors of smart editions with fine bindings. But Lewis gave up this taste when he was a young man, partly because thanks to the expense of the ménage with Mrs Moore he could no longer afford it, and partly because when he began to move towards Christianity he ceased to think that such things were more than vanity. In consequence the books on the shelves are nothing very special, nor are there very many of them, for Lewis uses the Bodleian (the University library) for all but essential volumes. The few that are on his shelves are mainly cheap or second-hand copies of major works, both theological and literary. The Summa Theologiae of Aquinas stands near Beowulf and the Roman de la Rose, while notably absent are The Allegory of Love and Out of the Silent Planet, for Lewis takes no trouble to keep copies of his own books, and gives (or even throws) them away at the slightest opportunity. On the other hand The Hobbit is there, next to Barfield’s children’s story The Silver Trumpet, while there are several of Charles Williams’s books here too. There are also books in the two smaller rooms that open off the main sitting-room. In one of these rooms Warnie Lewis works on weekday mornings, and several rarities can be found on the shelves here, for Warnie collects works relating to the Bourbon court and is always glad to lay his hands on a fine edition. In this room there is also a typewriter, which Warnie uses both for his own work (he is beginning to arrange material for a book of his own on the court of Louis XIV) and for typing his brother’s letters, for he now acts as secretary to Jack. Lying by the typewriter is a packet of cheap typing paper and a large pair of scissors. Warnie dislikes wasting paper (especially under wartime economy conditions) and he refuses to use anything smarter than this stuff for Jack’s correspondence. Moreover if the letter is a short one, Warnie will not use up a complete sheet of paper for it, but will cut off a strip just deep enough to hold the text and his brother’s signature, and will send off this two- or three-inch slip complete with a reference number (‘40/216’) to make it clear to the recipient that Jack Lewis has already written two hundred and sixteen letters this year. Jack is faintly embarrassed by all this.
The other small room is Jack’s bedroom. He sleeps here during term time, rising early on most mornings to go to college prayers before breakfast, or to Communion. The bedroom is bare and looks a little like a monastic cell, for there is nothing in it besides a washstand with a jug and basin, and a pile of books beside the bed. Yet those books include not just the Prayer Book and the Bible but one of the Waverley novels, Trollope’s The Warden, and The Wind in the Willows.
It is dark, being about nine o’clock on a winter evening; and it is also cold, particularly in the big sitting-room which looks north on to Magdalen Grove. The only source of heat is the coal fire, which at the moment is burning very low in the grate, for it is a couple of hours since anyone has been in the room. A faded screen has been set up near the door which leads out on to the staircase, in the hope of muffling the draught; but it makes little difference.
Magdalen clock strikes nine, other college clocks preceding and following it in the distance. Now and then, feet run up and down the stairs outside the door; but it is not until after Great Tom at Christ Church half a mile away has sounded his hundred and one strokes at ten past nine that a more measured tread is heard on the stairs, and the door opens to reveal two men. The first takes off his hat and coat and throws them down on the nearest chair. Then he pulls down the blinds and draws the blackout curtains, after which his companion switches on the light.
The first man is broadly built, with a plump rather red face, a small moustache, and receding hair. He wears a tweed jacket and baggy flannel trousers. He is Warnie Lewis. In the first months of the war he was on active service, stationed at le Havre with the R.A.S.C., but it was soon decided that officers of his age were not needed, and he was allowed to go back on the retired list and return home. Now that he is back in Oxford he is spending a good deal of his time living on his motor boat Bosphorus and cruising up and down the river as part of the Upper Thames Patrol. He has painted his boat battleship-grey and has bought a naval style peaked cap, much to the amusement of Jack.
His companion is R. E. Havard, the Oxford doctor who looks after the Lewis and Tolkien households and who regularly comes to Magdalen on Thursday evenings. He is a few years younger than Warnie and is expecting to be called up for military service fairly soon, albeit as a medical officer. For some reason Havard has always attracted nicknames from the Inklings. Though his Christian names are Robert Emlyn he was once referred to by Hugo Dyson as ‘Humphrey’, either in pure error or because it alliterated with his surname. Some time later, Warnie Lewis was irritated one evening by Havard’s failure to turn up with a car and give him a promised lift home, and dubbed the doctor ‘a useless quack’; and ‘The Useless Quack’ or ‘U.Q.’ Havard has remained. How far this is from being an accurate description of the man may be gauged by Tolkien’s remark to one of his sons: ‘Most doctors are either fools or mere “doctors”, tinkerers with machinery. Havard at any rate is a Catholic who thinks of people as people, not as collections of “works”.’
When the light has been switched on, Warnie Lewis puts some coal on the fire, and grumbles to Havard about the shortage of beer in Oxford – beer is in low supply because of the war, and the Bird and Baby frequently has a ‘No Beer’ sign on its door. ‘My idea of the happy life,’ says Warnie, ‘would be to buy a pub, put up one of those No Beer notices, lock the customers out, and drink the stuff myself.’
The two men talk about beer for a few minutes more, Warnie referring contemptuously to an inferior brew that he and Havard have just been drinking at a hotel down the road – he describes it as ‘varnish’, the term that he and Jack always use for bad beer.
There is no fixed hour at which the Inklings meet on Thursdays, but by general agreement people turn up at any time between nine and half past ten. Nor is there any formal system of membership or election, and in theory it is only necessary for one Inkling to obtain the approval of the others (particularly of Lewis) before introducing somebody new. But in practice this does not happen very often, and on most Thursdays the company consists solely of the Lewis brothers, Tolkien, Havard and Williams, sometimes with the addition of Hugo Dyson, who teaches at Reading University but is often in Oxford. Nevill Coghill used to be quite a regular member of the group, but he is in great demand as a producer of plays for the University dramatic society and other local groups, and he is now rarely seen in Lewis’s rooms on Thursday nights. He is not the only Inkling to have dropped out: Adam Fox, the Magdalen chaplain who (thanks to the campaign conducted by Tolkien and Lewis) was elected Professor of Poetry in 1938 rarely comes now. Owen Barfield very occasionally turns up on his visits from London, where he still works as a solicitor; and sometimes Charles Wrenn looks in. But for the most part the Thursday party is a small group. A direct result is that usually the only people to read their work aloud are Tolkien, Lewis and Williams. Coghill has once or twice read light verses or lampoons, and Fox (when he comes) generally reads his poetry. Up to the present time Warnie Lewis has had nothing of his own to read to the Inklings, and as for Havard, he always emphasises that he is not a literary man, though he does occasionally contribute some small thing to the group. Readings therefore are in comparatively short supply. Hugo Dyson (when he attends) does not mind this at all, claiming that the conversation is far more enjoyable anyway. But Lewis insists that the readings – the original raison d’etre of the club – must be kept up. Sometimes, as chance will have it, a logical sequence appears, and one reading seems to lead naturally into the next. But this is by no means always the case.
Warnie begins to make tea – a regular ritual at the start of an Inklings – and in a few minutes Jack Lewis and Tolkien arrive; Lewis has been giving Tolkien dinner on High Table in Magdalen.
Both men are fairly certain of being able to remain in Oxford for the duration of the war. Tolkien is nearly fifty and will definitely not be required for active service; his contribution to the war effort is to take turns of duty as an air raid warden, spending one night every two weeks or so waiting by the telephone in a cheerless concrete hut in the grounds of St Hugh’s College. Lewis is several years younger than Tolkien, but he does not expect to be called up. He declares that his personal war aims are exactly summed up by an entry in the Peter-borough Chronicle: ‘During all this evil time, Abbot Martin retained his abbacy.’ However, he does duty with the Home Guard – and at this moment Havard is asking him how he takes to it.
‘Merrily enough I suppose,’ Lewis answers. ‘I spend one night in nine mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford with a rifle. I think that Dyson has the right idea about the Home Guard. He says it should be conducted on the same principle as Dogberry’s Watch in Much Ado – “Let us go sit on the church bench till two, and then all to bed.”’
Warnie asks his brother if there is any beer to be had. Jack usually brings a big enamel jug of it up from the college buttery, but apparently tonight the college is as short of it as is the Bird and Baby. ‘I think there’s some rum in the cupboard if anybody would like some,’ says Jack, and Warnie goes to look for it, while his brother declares:
‘I think positively the nastiest kind of war service is the thing that Barfield is doing. He’s just taken a part-time job in – would you believe it – the Inland Revenue, of all disgusting things! As I was saying to Tollers just now, he’s very depressed because he’s one of those people who really feels the miseries of the world, and the war is making him terribly gloomy.’
‘One can hardly blame him for that,’ says Tolkien. ‘None of us here has exactly displayed a totally unruffled cheerfulness throughout the year.’ He is thinking of the fall of France in June, when even Oxford’s calm was shaken by what seemed the certain prospect of invasion, and of the Battle of Britain, in which his own son Michael was involved as an anti-aircraft gunner.
‘No,’ says Lewis, ‘one can’t, but that’s not quite what I meant. What I’m trying to say is this: that there’s Barfield, with more than enough in his own and his neighbours’ personal lives to worry about, actually spending a good deal of time being miserable about the terrible sufferings which are being endured by people hundreds or thousands of miles away. Now, terrible as those sufferings are, I’m not quite sure whether it’s really one’s duty as a man and a Christian to be so vividly and continuously aware of them. Should we try, for instance, to be aware of what it’s like, say, to be a fighter pilot being shot down in flames at this moment?’
‘I should imagine Williams would think one ought to be very much aware of it indeed,’ says Harvard. ‘Isn’t that part of his “Co-inherence”?’
‘Yes, of course,’ answers Lewis. (He talks emphatically – ‘in italics’ as a pupil puts it – but does not raise his voice even in the heat of argument. There is just a trace of Ulster still in the vowel-sounds.) ‘Yes. I entirely accept the general principle. We must realise, as Williams would say, that we live in each other. But in purely practical terms, were we meant to know so much about the sufferings of the rest of the world? It seems to me that modern communications are so fast – with the wireless and the newspapers and so on – that there’s a burden imposed on our sympathy for which that sympathy just wasn’t designed.’
‘Give an example,’ says Tolkien.
‘That’s easy. Now, supposing the poor Jones family in your own street are having terrible troubles – sickness and so on – well then, obviously it’s your duty to sympathise with them. But what about the morning paper and the evening news broadcasts on the wireless, in which you hear all about the Chinese and the Russians and the Finns and the Poles and the Turks? Are you expected to sympathise with them in the same way? I really don’t think it’s possible, and I don’t think it’s your duty to try.’
‘You certainly can’t do them any good by being miserable about them,’ says Warnie.
‘Ah, but while that’s perfectly true it’s not the point. In the case of the Jones family next door, you’d think pretty poorly of the man who felt nothing in the way of sympathy for them because that feeling “wouldn’t do them any good”.’
‘Are you saying’, asks Havard, ‘that when we read the newspapers we shouldn’t try to sympathise with the sufferings of people we don’t know?’
‘Jack is probably saying’, remarks Warnie, ‘that we shouldn’t read the newspapers at all. You know he never bothers to look at anything other than the crossword.’
‘Perfectly true,’ answers his brother. ‘And I have two very good reasons for it. First of all I deplore journalism - I can’t abide the journalist’s air of being a specialist in everything, and of taking in all points of view and always being on the side of the angels. And I hate the triviality of journalism, you know, the sort of fluttering mentality that fills up the page with one little bit about how an actress has been divorced in California, and another little bit about how a train was derailed in France, and another about the birth of quadruplets in New Zealand.’
‘Well, I think it’s irresponsible of you not to read the war news, at least,’ says Warnie, and Havard grunts in agreement.
‘It might be, if the news was in any way accurate, or if I was qualified to interpret it. But instead here I am, without any military knowledge, being asked to read an account of the fighting that was distorted before it reached the Divisional general, and was further distorted before it left him, and then was “written up” out of all recognition by a journalist, and which will all be contradicted next day anyway – well, I ask you!’
‘Do you know,’ chimes in Tolkien, ‘I was coming back in a train from Liverpool the other week, and there was a Canadian and his wife in the opposite seat, and they drank neat gin out of aluminium cups all the way to Crewe, by which time their eyes had certainly become rather dewy.’
‘What on earth has that got to do with journalism?’ asks Lewis, who hates the conversation to degenerate into anecdote or mere chat.
‘Only that the man was labelled “War Correspondent”, so I shan’t wonder in future why these people’s despatches are so fatuous!’
Lewis roars with laughter.
‘What’s your other reason for not reading the papers?’ asks Havard. ‘I thought you said you had another?’
‘It’s this,’ answers Lewis, ‘though I’m almost ashamed to admit it. You see, I simply don’t understand most of what I find in them. I reckon that the world as it’s now becoming is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like me. I don’t understand its economics, or its politics, or any damn thing about it.’
‘Well, I imagine you understand its theology,’ says Warnie, handing round cups of tea.
‘Not a bit of it. In fact it’s very distressing. I always thought that when I got among Christians I’d have reached somewhere that was safe from that horrid thing modern thought. But did I? Oh no, not at all. I blundered straight into it. I thought I was an upholder of the old stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush, but it’s beginning to look as if what I call sternness is slush to most of them. Or at least that’s what it was like when I was talking to a group of Christian undergraduates the other day. They’d all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seemed to be a kind of opposite number to Karl Marx. They all talked like Covenanters or Old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience is of any value at all, and they maintain just as stoutly as Calvin that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just to us, let alone merciful. They hold on to the doctrine that all our righteousness is just filthy rags so fiercely and sincerely that I can tell you it’s like a blow in the face.’
‘If there’s really a religious revival, that’s probably what it’ll be like,’ says Warnie. ‘Does everyone want rum?’
‘Oh, do we really need any?’ answers his brother. ‘I thought you needed blackcurrant or something to go with it.’ The question of drink at an Inklings is a slightly delicate matter between the Lewis brothers. Warnie likes it to flow freely, but Jack maintains that regular drinking on Thursday nights alters the character of the club. (There is another factor, in that Jack is concerned about Warnie’s occasional bouts of heavy drinking, which have been going on sporadically for some years.) But tonight as the bottle is already open and Tolkien suggests adding hot water to the rum, Warnie wins and the glasses are handed round.
‘As Warnie says,’ remarks Havard, ‘if we do get a religious revival, it’ll probably be just like that – very Calvinist.’
‘I know,’ answers Lewis. ‘And will we like it? I mean, we’ve been delighted to see the churches almost full since the war began, and we talk enthusiastically of a Christian revival among the undergraduates, and there’s certainly some sign of it happening. But I rather think that if it really comes, people like us won’t find it nearly so agreeable as we’d expected. Of course, we ought to have remembered that if the real thing came it would make us sit up. Do you remember Chesterton? “Never invoke gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.”’
‘But you don’t think these people enthusing about Barth are necessarily wrong?’ Havard asks.
‘No, I don’t. I think the young gentlemen are probably largely right. But between ourselves I have a hankering for the old and happier days, the days when politics meant Tariff Reform, and war was war against the Zulus, and Religion meant that lovely word Piety – you know, “The decent church that crowns the neighbouring hill”, and “Mr Arabin sent the farmers home to their baked mutton very well satisfied”.’
There is a pause while Lewis lights his pipe. ‘Williams is coming later,’ he says through the stem, ‘but I don’t think anyone else will be turning up. Has anyone got anything to read?’
Tolkien says that he has brought ‘another Hobbit chapter’ – for some reason he rarely refers to his new book by its formal title, and the Inklings generally know it as the New Hobbit.
‘It’s a pity Coghill doesn’t come along on Thursdays much these days,’ remarks Warnie. ‘He liked Tollers’ first hobbit book so much that I’m sure he’d enjoy this.’
‘Of course,’ says Tolkien, ‘his “Producing” takes up a good deal of his time.’
‘Do you remember Coghill’s Hamlet about five years ago?’ Lewis asks, as Tolkien gets his manuscript ready.
‘It was pretty good stuff as such things go, as far as I remember,’ says Warnie.
Jack grunts. ‘I suppose it was, of its kind, but really I get next to no enjoyment out of these undergraduate productions. They act them in a way that fills one at first with embarrassment and pity, and finally with an unreasoning personal hatred of the actors – you know, “Why should that damned man keep on bellowing at me?”’
‘Hamlet is a fine enough play,’ says Tolkien, ‘providing you take it just so, and don’t start thinking about it. In fact I’m of the opinion that Old Bill’s plays in general are all the same – they just haven’t got any coherent ideas behind them.’
‘It’s Hamlet himself that I can’t abide,’ remarks Warnie. ‘Whenever I see the play I find myself conceiving the most frightful antipathy to him. I mean, there’s such an intolerable deal of him. Every few minutes all the other characters sneak off in a hard-hearted way and leave us at the mercy of this awful arch-bore for hundreds of lines. I remember when I saw Coghill’s version I thought the only dramatic merit had been supplied by him and not by Shakespeare.’
‘You sound as if you want to rewrite the play,’ says Havard.
‘And why not?’ answers Tolkien. ‘You could show what a stinking old bore his father really was, before he became a ghost (to the relief of the Danish court), and how nice poor Claudius was by comparison.’
‘And how the old man really died of some nasty disease and wasn’t murdered at all,’ adds Warnie.
‘And then even in the grave couldn’t keep from mischief,’ continues Tolkien.
‘… but had to come back with a filthy cock-and-bull story about a murder, which at first was too much even for his own son to swallow,’ adds Jack Lewis, who admires Hamlet profoundly but cannot resist joining in this nonsense.
‘… the son being a chip of the old blockhead, and quite as conceited as papa.’ Tolkien concludes. ‘But I suppose it won’t ever get written.’
‘It might make an opera,’ muses Lewis.
‘Wagner?’
‘No, I think something more in the style of Mozart. We must have a go at it. But let’s hear the new chapter.’
Tolkien begins to read from his manuscript.
It is the chapter which describes the arrival of the hobbits and their companions at the doors of the Mines of Moria, and which recounts the beginning of their journey through the darkness. Tolkien reads fluently. Occasionally he hesitates or stumbles, for the chapter is only in a rough draft, and he has some difficulty in making out a word here and there. The pages are closely covered – he has written it on the back of old examination scripts. One or two details are still uncertain: he explains that he has not yet worked out an Elvish version of the inscription over Moria Gate, and he reads it in English; he is uncertain whether the word of power with which Gandalf opens the doors should be Mellyn or Meldir; and here and there he points out that he has got the details of distance or time of day wrong, and will have to correct them. But such small details do not interfere with the concentration of his listeners, for though he reads fast and does not enunciate very clearly, the story quickly takes charge. It is more than an hour before he has finished. Meanwhile the fire burns low, and nobody bothers to throw coal on it. At last he comes to the end.
‘“The Company passed under the northern arch and came through a doorway on their right. It was high and flat-topped, and the stone door was still upon its hinges, standing half open. Beyond it was a large square chamber, lit by a wide shaft in the far wall – it slanted upwards and far above a small square patch of sky could be seen. The light fell directly on a table in the midst of the chamber, a square block three feet high upon which was laid a great slab of whitened stone.”’ He pauses and puts his manuscript aside. ‘That’s as far as it runs. The end is in rather a muddle, and there should have been a song earlier, in which Gimli recollects the ancient days when Moria was peopled by Durin’s folk.’
‘I don’t think that’s needed,’ says Lewis. (Of Tolkien’s poetry, he generally admires only the alliterative verse.) Tolkien does not reply. Instead he says:
‘Did you realise that the faint patter of feet is Gollum following them? He is to reappear now, you see.’
‘Oh yes, I think that’s clear,’ says Lewis. ‘And the underground stuff is marvellous, the best of its kind I’ve ever heard. Neither Haggard nor MacDonald equal it. Perhaps you could just spread yourself a little more in the scene where that Thing comes out of the water and grabs at Frodo. It’s a little unprepared at the moment – shouldn’t there be ripples on the water when it starts to move?’ Tolkien agrees and makes a note of this.
‘I was struck,’ says Warnie (offering more rum to the company), ‘by that bit about the cats of Queen – what was her name?’
“‘He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel,”’ quotes Tolkien. ‘Yes. Do you know, I find that rather puzzling. Trotter just made the allusion to her without any forethought by me – she just popped up, in fact. Odd, isn’t it?’ (‘Trotter’ is the character who will later be renamed ‘Strider’.)
‘So you’ve no idea who she was?’ asks Jack Lewis, putting more coal on the fire.
There is a gleam in Tolkien’s eye. ‘No, I didn’t say that. I said she just popped up. Since she did, I do have a notion that she was the wife of one of the ship-kings of Pelargir.’
‘Pelargir?’ asks Warnie. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘No, you wouldn’t: the story hasn’t reached it yet. It was a great port, you see, and poor Berúthiel loathed the smell of the sea, and fish and gulls, like the giantess Skadi – do you remember her?’ (he turns to Lewis). ‘She came to the gods in Valhalla and demanded a husband in payment for her father’s death. They lined everybody up behind a curtain and she selected the pair of feet that appealed to her most. She thought she’d got Balder, but it turned out to be Njord; and after she’d married him she got fed up with the seaside life, and the gulls kept her awake, and at last she went back to live in Jotunheim. Well, Berúthiel went to live in an inland city too, and she went to the bad – or returned to it: she was a black Númenórean in origin, I suspect – and she was one of those people who hate cats, but cats will jump on them and follow them about (you know how they can pursue people who loathe them). I’m afraid she took to torturing them for amusement, but she trained some to go on evil errands by night, to spy on people or terrify them.’ Tolkien stops and relights his pipe, and there is a respectful pause from his audience (though in fact a certain amount of what he said was not entirely audible to them, thanks to his speed and the pipe in his mouth).
‘I don’t know how you think of these things,’ says Havard, who does not actually find it easy to appreciate The Lord of the Rings, but who certainly admires the fertility of Tolkien’s imagination.
‘How does any author think of anything?’ answers Jack Lewis, quick as usual to turn the particular into the general. ‘I don’t think that conscious invention plays a very great part in it. For example, I find that in many respects I can’t direct my imagination: I can only follow the lead it gives me.’
‘Absolutely true,’ says Warnie. ‘I mean, when I picture the country house I’d like to have if I were a rich man, I can say that my study window opens on a level park full of old timbers, but I can only see undulating ground with a fir-topped knoll. I can fix my mind, of course, on the level park, but when I turn to the window again after arranging my books, there’s that damn knoll once more.’
‘That’s exactly what I find when I’m writing a story,’ declares his brother. ‘I must use the knoll and can’t force myself to use the level park.’
Havard asks: ‘What do you suppose is the explanation, or the significance? I imagine Jung would ascribe it to the collective unconscious, whose dictates you are being obliged to follow.’
‘Maybe,’ Lewis says. ‘Jung’s archetypes do seem to explain it, though I’d have thought Plato’s would do just as well. And isn’t Tollers saying the same thing in another way when he tells us that Man is merely the sub-creator and that all stories originate with God?’ Tolkien grunts in agreement. ‘But the real point is not how it happens (because surely we can never be certain about that) but that it does happen. You see, I come more and more to the conclusion that all stories are waiting, somewhere, and are slowly being recovered in fragments by different human minds according to their abilities – and of course being partially spoiled in each writer by the admixture of his own mere individual “invention”. Do you agree?’ He turns to Tolkien.
‘Of course, of course. Although you may feel that your story is profoundly “true”, all the details may not have that “truth” about them. It’s seldom that the inspiration (if we are choosing to call it that) is so strong and lasting that it leavens all the lump, and doesn’t leave much that is mere uninspired “invention”.’
‘What about the new Hobbit book?’ asks Havard. ‘How much of that would you say was “true”?’
Tolkien sighs. ‘I don’t know. One hopes … But you mean, I take it, how much of it “came” ready-made, and how much was conscious invention. It’s very difficult to say. One doesn’t, perhaps, identify the two elements in one’s mind as it’s happening. As I recall, I knew from the beginning that it had to be some kind of quest, involving hobbits – I’d got hobbits on my hands, hadn’t I? And then I looked for the only point in The Hobbit, in the first book, that showed signs of development. I thought I’d choose the Ring as the key to the next story – though that was the mere germ, of course. But I want to make a big story out of it, so it had got to be the Ring, not just any magic ring. (I invented that little rhyme about One Ring to rule them all, I remember, in my bath one day.)’
‘But all that part of it was, by the sound of it, mere invention,’ says Lewis. ‘Didn’t you find when you actually began to write that things appeared largely of their own accord?’
‘Of course. I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. The Black Riders were completely unpremeditated – I remember the first one, the one that Frodo and the hobbits hide from on the road, just turned up without any forethought. I knew all about Tom Bombadil already, but I’d never been to Bree. And then in the inn at Bree, Trotter sitting in the corner of the bar parlour was a real shock – totally unexpected – and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. And I remember I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear at Bag End on September the twenty-second. What’s more, I can tell you that there are quite a few unexplained things still lurking. Seven stars and seven stones and one white tree: now, what do you make of that? I know it will play some important part in the story, but I can’t say what.’
‘In the same sort of way,’ says Lewis, ‘I have a picture in my mind – it’s been there for some time – of floating islands, islands that float. At present (if it interests you even remotely to know it) I’m trying to build up a world in which floating islands could exist.’
There is a moment’s silence, broken by Warnie.
‘Well, Tollers, whether it’s inspiration or invention, I still don’t know how you keep up your story so magnificently. It hasn’t flagged for a moment. I can tell you without exaggeration that simply nothing has come my way for a long time which has given me such enjoyment and excitement.’
‘Oh yes,’ adds his brother. ‘It’s more than good: the only word I can use is great.’
Warnie continues: ‘But how the public will take it, I can’t imagine. I should think, Tollers, you’d better prepare yourself for a lot of misunderstanding. I’m afraid some people will interpret it as a political allegory – you know, the Shire standing for England, Sauron for Stalin, and that kind of thing.’
‘Whereas of course the truth’, says Jack, ‘is that no sooner had he begun to write it than the real events began to conform to the pattern he’d invented.’
‘I know that Tolkien always reminds us that it isn’t allegory,’ Havard says, ‘but I don’t quite see why it’s so silly at least to attempt to interpret it allegorically. I’m sure that some perfectly sensible people are bound to.’
‘Of course they are,’ answers Tolkien. ‘And while, as you know, I dislike conscious and intentional allegory, it’s quite true that any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. And indeed the more “life” a story has, the more readily it will be susceptible of allegorical interpretations; while conversely, the better a deliberate allegory is, the more nearly it will be acceptable just as a story.’
Havard asks Tolkien: ‘If you’re prepared to admit the susceptibility of your Hobbit story to allegorical interpretation, what particular interpretations do you predict people will make?’
‘Well,’ Tolkien says, ‘I suppose all my stuff – both this new story and the earlier mythology from which it derives – is mainly concerned with the Fall, with mortality, and with the Machine. The Fall is an inevitable subject in any story about people; mortality in that the consciousness of it affects anyone who has creative desires that are left unsatisfied by plain biological life – any artist must desire great longevity; and by the Machine I mean the use of all external plans or devices, instead of the development of inner powers and talents – or even the use of those talents with the corrupted motive of dominating, of bullying the world and coercing other wills. The Machine is merely our more obvious modern form. (By the way, did you know that a maker of motor bikes has named his product Ixion Cycles? Ixion, who was bound for ever in Hell on a perpetually revolving wheel!)’
‘But can’t you admire any machines? Havard asks. ‘The advance of medicine depends greatly on the benefits that they can confer.’
‘Maybe,’ Tolkien replies. ‘But it seems to me that the ultimate idea behind all machinery, however apparently beneficial its immediate function, is to create Power in this world. And that can’t be done with any real final satisfaction – unlike art, which is content to create a new world, a secondary world in the mind.’
‘Don’t you approve of any labour-saving devices?’ asks Warnie.
‘Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. The Fall only makes these devices not just fail of their desire, but turn to new and horrible evil. Look how we’ve “progressed”: from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It isn’t really man who is ultimately daunting and insupportable: it’s the man-made. If a Ragnarök would burn all the slums and gasworks and shabby garages, it could (for me) burn all the works of art – and I’d go back to trees.’
‘Certainly we seem to be progressing towards universal suburbia,’ Lewis says. ‘And while, as Havard suggests, the first stages of “Progress” may most certainly be beneficial, we have to know where to stop. And at the moment there doesn’t seem much hope that we will stop.’ He searches among his papers and takes out a sheet. ‘I’ve called this “Evolutionary Hymn”,’ he says, and begins to read.
‘Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair.
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us,
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.
‘To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn,
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.
‘Ask not if it’s god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.
‘Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature’s simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly:
“Goodness equals what comes next.”
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.’
‘Good,’ says Havard. ‘But I’m not clear whether it’s scientific progress you’re attacking, or Darwin. The objectives seem to have got a little muddled.’
‘That’s the whole point of the poem,’ Lewis answers. ‘What I’m saying isn’t that Darwin was wrong – though incidentally I believe biologists are already contemplating a withdrawal from the Darwinian position – but that Evolution as popularly imagined, the modern concept of Progress, is simply a fiction supported by no evidence whatever. It’s an older fiction than Darwin, in fact: you can find it in Keats’s Hyperion and in Wagner’s Ring, and it turns up in all sorts of forms, such as Shaw’s Life-Force; and for most people it has now taken the place of religion.’
‘But I still don’t see precisely what you’re attacking.’ Havard says.
‘Quite simply the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings. It’s probably the deepest-ingrained habit of mind in the contemporary world. It’s behind the idea that our morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustment, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. It always seems to me immensely implausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of it we can observe. You remember the old puzzle as to whether the first owl came from the first egg or the first egg from the first owl? Well, the modern belief in universal evolution is produced by attending exclusively to the owl’s emergence from the egg. From childhood we’re taught to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn; we aren’t so often reminded that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We’re always remarking that the express engine of today is the descendant of the Rocket, but we don’t equally remember that the Rocket didn’t come from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself – a man of genius.’
‘All right,’ answers Havard. ‘I understand your objection to the fact that progress is based on a misunderstanding of the process of development in nature. But does that mean that all progress is of necessity bad? I notice that you have no hesitation (nor does Tolkien for that matter) in using trains and cars when they’re offered. (Though I note you usually prefer a slow local train to a main line express.) But surely you must allow some good in mechanical science, such as the invention of printing? Didn’t that greatly expand culture and scholarship?’
‘Possibly,’ Lewis replies. ‘But have I too fanciful an imagination when I say that I suspect that the flood of so-called “learned” books which was beginning to overwhelm us before the war (and which will undoubtedly return with peace) must inevitably mean recent inferior work pushing good old books out of the way? That is what we shall see, I’m sure.’
‘And what about literature?’ Warnie asks. ‘You must allow of some improvement in that over the centuries.’
‘Not at all, not as a general statement. Barfield proved years ago that what we have actually experienced is a decay, a breaking-up of the ancient unity in which myth could not have any “meaning” separated from it, into allegory, where the meaning can be distinguished and detached; and the ultimate result of this process is of course a literature that has no meaning at all! The other day I read a symposium on T. S. Eliot’s “Cooking Egg” poem. There were seven contributors, all of them men whose lives have been devoted to the study of poetry for thirty years or so, and do you know there wasn’t the slightest agreement between any of them as to what the poem meant!’
‘I can well believe it,’ says Tolkien.
‘Yet to be fair, can you tell us what Tolkien’s story means?’ asks Havard.
‘But that’s the whole point!’ Lewis answers. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, in the sense of abstracting a meaning from it. Tollers may regard it fundamentally as “about” the Fall and Mortality and the Machine, but that may not be how I read it. Indeed it seems to me (with due respect) a great mistake to try and attach any kind of abstract meaning to a story like his. Story – or at least a great Story of the mythical type – gives us an experience of something not as an abstraction but as a concrete reality. We don’t “understand the meaning” when we read a myth, we actually encounter the thing itself. Once we try to grasp it with the discursive reason, it fades. Let me give you an example. Here I am trying to explain the fading, the vanishing of tasted reality when the reasoning part of the mind is applied to it. Probably I’m making heavy weather of it.’
‘You are,’ says Warnie.
‘All right. Let me remind you instead of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was supposed to lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared. Now what was merely a principle should become imaginable to you.’
‘I never thought of applying that meaning to the Orpheus story,’ Warnie says.
‘Of course not. You weren’t looking for an abstract “meaning” in it at all. You weren’t knowing, but tasting. But what you were tasting turns out to be a universal principle. Of course the moment we state the principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstractions. It’s only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience a principle concretely. Let’s take an example from quite a different sort of story. Consider Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows – that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness and goodness. The child who has once met Mr Badger has got ever afterwards, in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and English social history which it certainly couldn’t get from any abstraction. Now do you see what I mean?’
‘This talk of “tasted reality”,’ says Tolkien, ‘reminds me of an experience I had the other day, in which I think I encountered the same thing in a different fashion. It sounds rather ridiculous, but I was riding along on my bicycle past the Radcliffe Infirmary when I had one of those sudden clarities, the kind that sometimes come in dreams. I remember saying aloud with absolute conviction, “But of course! Of course that’s how things really do work.” But I couldn’t reproduce the argument that had led to this, although the sensation was the same as having been convinced by reason (though without any reasoning). And I’ve since thought that one of the explanations as to why one can’t recapture the wonderful argument or secret when one wakes up is simply that there wasn’t one, but there was some kind of direct appreciation by the mind without any chain of argument as we know it in our time-serial life.’
‘I think that’s fascinating,’ Warnie says, ‘and I’m sure I’ve experienced something of the same kind myself. But I’m a little worried still whether the people who read Tollers’s new Hobbit story are going to appreciate all this. I’m sure that some critics will talk about it as simply “escapist” and “wish-fulfilment” and that sort of thing. You know the way these people go on.’
‘Very probably they will,’ answers Tolkien. ‘Though anyone who in real life actually found himself, say, journeying through the Mines of Moria would, I imagine, wish to escape from that, to exchange it for almost any other place in the world! You see, I think that if there is any “escapism” involved, it’s in being able to survey danger and evil (when we read a story) without any disturbance of our spiritual equilibrium. We’re escaping from the limitations of our own personality, which wouldn’t allow us to have any adventures because we’d be too frightened! And really, you know, these critics who are so sensitive to the least hint of “escapism” – well, what class of men would you expect to be so worked up about people escaping?’ The company waits for an answer. ‘Jailers!’ says Tolkien.
‘Yes,’ adds Lewis, laughing. ‘They’re afraid that any glimpse of a remote prospect would make their own stuff seem less exclusively important.’
‘But you must be aware’, Havard remarks, ‘that some people will find a story like Tolkien’s to be deficient in the kind of detailed studies of complex human personalities that you find in Tolstoy or Jane Austen.’
‘Of course,’ Lewis answers. ‘But that isn’t a criticism. It’s merely saying that the Hobbit story is different. A critic who likes Tolstoy and Jane Austen and doesn’t like Tolkien should stick to novels of manners and not attack the Hobbit book. His own taste doesn’t qualify him to condemn a story which is primarily not about human behaviour. We mustn’t listen to Pope’s maxim about the proper study of mankind: the proper study of man is everything, everything that gives a foothold to the imagination and the passions.’
‘Including elves and goblins?’ asks Havard.
‘Of course. They do the same thing that Mr Badger does: they’re an admirable hieroglyphic which conveys psychology and types of character much more briefly and effectively than any novelistic presentation could do. Now, I know that Tolkien’s story does lie on (or beyond) one of the frontiers of taste; what I mean is, if you ask someone, “Do you like stories about other worlds – or hunting stories – or stories of the supernatural – or historical novels?”, you will always get an unalterable “yes” or “no” from the very depth of the heart. I don’t know why; it’s a very interesting literary fact which I’ve never seen discussed by any critic of merit, certainly not by Aristotle or Johnson or Coleridge. Anyway there it is, and Tollers’s book will undoubtedly provoke that “yes” or “no” response. But the point is that the people who say “no” shouldn’t try to stop other people from saying “yes”. For a start, they may be proved entirely wrong by history: the book that they scorn today may be a classic for the intelligentsia of the twenty-third century. Very odd things may happen: our age may be known not as the age of Eliot and Pound and Lawrence but as the age of Buchan and Wode-house, and perhaps Tolkien. You see, the trouble is that our map of literature is always drawn up to look like a list of examination results, with the honour candidates above that line and the pass people below. But surely we ought to have a whole series of vertical columns, each representing different kinds of work, and an almost infinite series of horizontal lines crossing these to represent the different degrees of goodness in each. For instance in the “Adventure Story” column you’d have the Odyssey at the top and Edgar Wallace at the bottom, and Rider Haggard and Stevenson and Scott and William Morris – and of course Tollers – placed on horizontal lines crossing “Adventure Story” at whatever heights we decide. But look, Tollers never answered Warnie’s criticism about “wish-fulfilment”.’
‘It wasn’t a criticism,’ Warnie answers. ‘I was merely suggesting that some people might say it.’
‘Most certainly they will,’ Tolkien says. ‘But one can only ask, is the wish itself such a bad one? And in what sense is it fulfilled? Of course there are certain books which do arouse and imaginatively satisfy certain wishes which ought to be left alone – pornography is the obvious example. But I’m quite certain that the longing for fairy-land is fundamentally different in character. As I’ve already suggested, we don’t actually want to experience all the dangers and discomforts of the Mines of Moria, in the way that somebody susceptible to pornography wants to experience the things it describes. We don’t want to be in Moria: but the story (I hope) does have an effect on us. It stirs us and troubles us.’
‘That’s right,’ says Lewis. ‘Far from dulling or emptying the actual, of reducing it to something very low as pornography does, it gives it a new dimension. Look, a child doesn’t despise real woods just because he’s been reading about enchanted woods. What he’s read makes all real woods a little enchanted. And a boy who has any imagination enjoys eating cold meat, which he’d otherwise find dull, by pretending that it’s buffalo-meat, which he’s just killed with his own bow and arrow. As a result, the real meat tastes more savoury. In fact you might say that only then is it the real meat. This isn’t a retreat from reality. It’s a rediscovery of it.’
The Magdalen clock chimes the quarter. Warnie looks at his watch. ‘Eleven-fifteen. We shan’t be seeing Charles tonight, I’m afraid.’ He turns to Tolkien. ‘There’s one thing I meant to ask. What actually happens at the end of that chapter? It seemed to stop a bit abruptly.’
‘The Company discovers a great book,’ Tolkien answers, ‘in which is written the history of the reoccupation of Moria by the dwarves, under the leadership of Balin (you may remember him from my first hobbit story). I’ve delayed writing that bit because there are a number of linguistic problems relating to the text which they find. And they also discover a tomb, in which lies the body of Balin, slain by – well, we shall be coming to that.’
‘Tomb?’ asks Lewis doubtfully. ‘Surely a pyre would be more likely?’
‘No,’ answers Tolkien. ‘They buried their dead. Or rather, they laid them in tombs of stone, never in earth (as might be expected, considering their origins). Only in the most dire necessity did they resort to burning their dead – it happened once, after the great battle at Azanulbizar, when more were slain than they could possibly have entombed, and then they made pyres, but only reluctantly.’
‘It does seem a little odd,’ muses Lewis, ‘or at least a little out of character with what you must admit is the Teutonic nature of your dwarves. Are we to take it from this that they believed in the resurrection of the body?’
‘A difficult question,’ Tolkien answers. ‘But really, you know, it must be a tomb.’
‘Why, Tollers?’ Warnie asks. ‘You don’t object to cremation, do you?’
‘Generally speaking, the Catholic Church forbids it,’ says Havard, who has been a Catholic for about ten years. ‘There are exceptions, I believe, when there is any special reason – a plague, for instance. But in general it is not allowed, because (of course) it rather goes against belief in bodily resurrection.’
‘Oh, come now,’ says Lewis. ‘Your Church is perfectly entitled to practise what it chooses, but you can’t say that cremation denies the resurrection of the body. Why should the resurrection of a cremated body be any less plausible than that of a decayed body?’
‘That may be true,’ says Tolkien, ‘but you would find in fact that cremation is far more widely accepted by atheists than by adherents to any form of Christianity. It may not logically contradict the resurrection of the body, but it clearly goes with disbelief in it.’
‘But why on earth should it?’ asks Warnie. ‘I just don’t see that you’re putting up any case against cremation whatever.’
‘A corpse is a temple of the Holy Ghost,’ Tolkien says.
‘But you must admit, a vacated temple,’ Lewis answers.
‘Yes,’ Havard says. ‘But does that mean that it is right to destroy it? If a church has to be vacated for some reason, you don’t immediately blow it up or burn it to the ground.’
‘You would do,’ Warnie answers, ‘to prevent it being used, shall we say, by Communists. You’d surely rather see it destroyed then?’
‘No,’ Tolkien answers, ‘I would not.’
Warnie persists: ‘Why not?’
‘It’s very difficult to explain.’ Tolkien shifts uncomfortably in his chair. (‘I have no skill in verbal dialectic,’ he has remarked to one of his sons, adding, ‘I tend to lose my temper in arguments touching fundamentals, which is fatal.’) He says: ‘Take a slightly different example: if you knew that a chalice was going to be used by black magicians – as in that story of Williams’s – you wouldn’t regard it as therefore being your duty to destroy it, would you?’
‘I think I would,’ Warnie answers.
‘Then you would be mentally guilty if you did so. It would be your business simply to reverence it, and what the magicians did to it afterwards would be theirs.’
‘With due respect to your beliefs, Tollers,’ declares Lewis, ‘I think you are entirely missing the point.’ He is uncomfortably aware that the two Anglicans and the two Catholics have ranged themselves rather belligerently against each other, but he cannot by his nature drop an argument half-way through. ‘Surely the Incarnation is a key to what we should believe about the body? You remember the words of the Athanasian Creed: One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh …’
Another voice, with a London accent, takes up his words from the doorway: ‘… but by taking of the Manhood into God.’ Charles Williams has arrived after all. ‘One altogether,’ he continues to chant, ‘not by confusion of Substance; but by unity of Person.’ He crosses the room with brisk movements and throws himself down in the middle of the Chesterfield. ‘For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man; so God and Man is one Christ.’
‘We have been discussing,’ says Lewis a little lamely, ‘the subject of cremation.’
‘“Those are pearls that were his eyes …”’ Williams replies. ‘O, don’t you think that would be the best sort of burial? “Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.”’ He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, crossing his legs, so that his grey suit becomes a little creased. (Eliot’s description of Williams at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s seems fitted to Williams among the Inklings: ‘One retained the impression that he was pleased and grateful for the opportunity of meeting the company, and yet that it was he who had conferred a favour – more than a favour, a kind of benediction, by coming.’)
‘You’re frightfully late, Charles,’ says Warnie. ‘I expect you’d like some tea. Where have you been?’
Williams sighs. ‘I was asked by some undergraduates to address them on Malory. I assented. I did not quite like not to. But it was – to be frank …’ He leaves the sentence unfinished.
‘Well, I’m sure they were enthralled,’ says Warnie. ‘I know your lectures are being greatly valued.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ adds his brother. ‘It’s a long time since anyone dropped on Oxford with such a cometary blaze.’
‘O, but yes,’ answers Williams. ‘Yet – one does not live by reputations. I’m always a trifle worried by Our Lord’s dictum, “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you.”’ He turns to Lewis. ‘By the way, your Mr Sampson has been talking to me on the telephone. He has in mind a book for his “Christian Challenge” series; and would I be open to a proposal? I would, of course. There is a novel that I feel I ought to be doing, but I do not know what it is to be about, and for the moment …’ (Ashley Sampson is the publisher who commissioned Lewis’s The Problem of Pain.)
‘I gather’, Lewis says, ‘he wants you to write something about the forgiveness of sins.’
‘He does,’ Williams answers. ‘It is, of course, something that we have often considered, and yet a good deal of thought is still required.’ (He often uses the ceremonial ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, declaring it not to be conceit but showing an awareness of ‘function’.) ‘One thing particularly nags: he wishes an entire chapter to be devoted to How We Should Forgive the Germans.’ He sighs. ‘It will not be easy.’
‘Do you know.’ Tolkien says, ‘there was a solemn article in the local paper the other day seriously advocating the systematic extermination of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory because, if you please, they are all rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil! Can you beat it?’
‘Yes,’ says Lewis. ‘How do you begin to talk about forgiveness to the kind of person who writes that stuff?’
‘On the other hand,’ remarks Havard, ‘I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Germans if you were a Pole or a Jew?’
‘So do I,’ Lewis says. ‘I wonder very much. And I suppose that compared to them we have nothing to forgive, and shouldn’t even begin to try.’
‘Exactly,’ says Williams. ‘By the side of their sufferings it would be ridiculous for us to – O so laboriously – forgive the Germans for the small things they have inflicted on most of us: a slight financial loss, a personal separation or two. Without real personal injury, there can be little question of real forgiveness.’
‘It seems to me,’ says Tolkien, ‘that in doing what that newspaper article did, we are in spirit doing exactly what the Germans have done. They have declared the Poles and Jews to be exterminable vermin, utterly subhuman. We now declare that all the Germans are snakes, and should be systematically put to death. We have as much right to say that, as they have to exterminate the Jews: in other words, no right at all, whatever they may have done.’
‘Otherwise,’ Lewis says, ‘we will be no better than the Nazis.’
‘Exactly. As Gandalf often says, you can’t fight the Enemy with his own Ring without turning into an Enemy yourself.’ Tolkien sighs.
Warnie shifts uncomfortably. ‘This is getting a bit rarefied. I mean, in purely practical terms the best way to ensure that the Germans don’t do it again, when the war is over, is to put their leaders to death. That’s only practical common sense.’
‘It does sound very much like it,’ says Williams.
‘And it seems to me’, Warnie continues, ‘that taking what Jack and Tollers were saying only just a little bit further, you land up in a kind of pacifist state of mind in which you’re not going to fight anybody, however wicked and dangerous they are, because you know that potentially you’re just as wicked and dangerous yourself. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not attacking real pacifism, a real hatred of war. The only true pacifists I’ve met have been professional soldiers – they know too much about the game to be fire-eaters. What I’m attacking is the kind of woolly intellectual pacifism which we’ve all seen a good deal of.’
‘Oh, of course,’ says his brother. ‘I don’t think any of us is really remotely pacifist in the sense that we’re uneasy at taking part in a war. Don’t we all believe that it’s lawful for a Christian to bear arms when commanded by constituted authority, unless he has a very good reason – which a private person scarcely can have – for believing the war to be unjust?’
‘The notion that the use of physical force against another is always sinful’, says Williams, ‘is based on the belief that the worst possible sin is the taking of physical life. Which I’m sure none of us believes.’
‘I know it’s off the point,’ Havard interjects, ‘but I’d like to ask Williams what he would regard as the worst possible sin?’
Williams answers without a moment’s hesitation: ‘The exclusion of love.’
Havard nods.
‘Certainly war is a dreadful thing,’ Lewis continues, ‘and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he’s entirely mistaken. What I can’t understand is the sort of semi-pacificism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face, as if you were ashamed of it.’
‘Oh yes,’ Tolkien agrees. ‘And it’s a perfectly ridiculous attitude. I find it refreshing to discover at least some young men who have the opposite approach. I’ve met several, all of them airmen as it happens, to whom the war has offered the perfect round hole for a round peg – and they only found square holes before the war. What I mean is, the job of fighting demands a quality of daring and individual prowess in arms that I’d have thought was a real problem for a war-less world fully to satisfy.’
‘All right,’ says Warnie. ‘You’re not, any of you, supporting pacifism. You say it’s all right to fight Hitler. But you’re not in favour of exacting cold-blooded revenge after the war has been won. Is that it?’
‘Yes,’ says his brother. ‘And I’d have thought that the prohibitions in the Sermon on the Mount supported that view – they don’t prohibit war, but revenge.’
‘You’re certain, in fact, that it’s our duty to forgive the Germans, both now and after the war?’
‘Oh yes. We must love our enemies and pray for our persecutors. Our Lord made that perfectly clear.’
‘And yet you say that in practical terms it’s silly to try and forgive them for what they’ve done to us, because what we’ve suffered is nothing compared to the sufferings of the Jews and the Poles. So it would seem to me,’ Warnie concludes, ‘that our duty is to try and forgive them on behalf of the Jews and the Poles.’
‘O but is it?’ Williams asks. ‘When we ask the Omnipotence to forgive Herr Hitler for what he has done to the Jews, are we not in fact reminding Him of how terrible Herr Hitler is? Are we really asking for forgiveness, or indulging our anger?’
‘Isn’t there such a thing as holy anger?’ Havard asks.
‘There is: O yes there is,’ Williams answers. ‘“The golden blazonries of love irate” – mingled with compassion. But, you know, holy anger is a very dangerous thing indeed for anyone who isn’t a saint to play with. Supernatural indignation may be possible, but it springs from a supernatural root. Our business is surely to look for that root rather than to cultivate the anger?’
‘All right then,’ says Warnie. ‘Why don’t we just say we pardon them and have done with it?’
‘A little facile,’ Jack grunts.
‘And anything other than a facile pardon would probably, in the circumstances, prove to be impossible,’ Tolkien adds. ‘Say you were a man who’d been deliberately crippled by the Gestapo, or you’d seen your wife tortured – well, you’d almost certainly be unable to reach a state of real forgiveness, even if you thought it was your duty to try to.’
‘Vicarious pardon, may be?’ Williams asks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone who has endured what Tolkien describes might, well, entreat anyone who loved him to make an effort towards pardon on his behalf.’
‘Exchange and Substitution again, Charles?’ Lewis asks.
‘An operation of it. But you know, we seem to forget that many Germans (including Hitler? possibly indeed) may feel that they have much to forgive us. And what sort of reconciliation can be achieved if we are prepared to forgive but not to be forgiven?’
Lewis sighs. ‘Of course, Charles. You’re quite right. But it’s getting late, and as usual you’re turning the whole issue topsy-turvy and discovering all sorts of complications that really needn’t concern us now.’ (Williams smiles.) ‘As I see it, you want a straight answer (for the purposes of your book) to the question: what are we going to do about the Germans after the war is over? Now, I’d have thought that you can quite simply resign the whole issue to the civil authorities, whose task it is to decide such things. You can say that it is our duty to be in as best a state of forgiveness as we can manage, and that it is their job – the League of Nations, I mean – to do whatever they think fit.’
‘Ah yes,’ says Williams. ‘The League of Nations: but it owes its existence to treaties, does it not? And the problem with the Germans is that they are breakers of treaties; they deny the League of Nations.’
‘Well of course the League can respond by passing laws which declare the Germans guilty of various crimes,’ Warnie says, ‘and it can then punish them. They would of course be retrospective laws, but really it wouldn’t be any more unjust than the Germans’ own behaviour.’
‘No more and no less unjust,’ says Jack. ‘We’re back with an eye for an eye. It would only be legalised vengeance. And we’re agreed that vengeance is out of the question.’
‘I wonder,’ Williams muses. ‘We can surely take vengeance if we choose; but we must be honest; we must call it vengeance.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ Havard asks. ‘Executions?’
‘Execution? Yes; maybe sacrifice. It is dangerous, but it could be done. It is a responsibility we could accept if we chose.’
‘I can’t see how,’ says Lewis.
‘Shall we say, the new League of Nations – whatever form it may take – might rise not merely out of the blood that has been shed in the war. It might be definitely dedicated to the future with blood formally shed.’
‘But we’ve already said that there’d be no justification for that,’ says Tolkien.
‘No justification, no. It would be a new thing. We should say in effect: “We have no right to punish you. But we are determined to purge our own hearts by sacrificing you.” And indeed to execute our enemy after that manner would be an admission of our solidarity with him. We should execute him not because he was different from us, but because we were the same as he.’
‘But this is quite impossible for Christians,’ Lewis expostulates. ‘It’s forbidden to the Church. And after all, if bloody vengeance is a sin, bloody sacrifice is an outrage.’
‘But if it were conceded outside the Church?’ Williams asks. ‘The Church, though refusing it in one sense, might allow it in another – as she does with divorce.’
‘You amaze me, Charles,’ Warnie bursts out. ‘Sheer bloodthirstiness!’
Williams laughs, and lights a cigarette with hands that shake (as they always do). ‘At the time of Munich,’ he says, ‘I was regarded as a cowardly wretch because I wanted peace and appeasement. Now I’m called a bloody wretch. A lonely furrower – that’s what I am!’ He gets up, says brief goodnights to the company, thanks Warnie for the tea (‘Why does no one else – except my wife – provide tea at all hours? You spoil me’) and is gone. Warnie and Havard follow a few minutes later, making for Havard’s car, which is parked in the yard at the back of the college. Magdalen clock strikes midnight as they leave, and as the last strokes die away another sound reaches their ears from some distance away. Jack Lewis has accompanied Tolkien downstairs, and as they leave the cloisters of New Buildings and make their way across the grass, they have started to improvise their opera about Hamlet’s father. It is a very strange noise.