Owen Barfield on Addison’s Walk
All this talk about praise, encouragement, and mutual admiration is a bit misleading. While the Inklings were quick to praise one another, they were also highly critical. To use a phrase much loved by Lewis, the Inklings were “hungry for rational opposition.” For what good is a creative group without critique, debate, and the clashing of perspectives? As Warren Lewis says, positive comments and negative ones are really two sides of the same coin: “Praise for good work was unstinted, but censure for bad work—or even not-so-good work—was often brutally frank.” In fact, if there is anything that the Inklings express more often than gratitude for encouragement, it is healthy respect for conflict.
Havard expresses it best: Lewis “read The Screwtape Letters to us. And very hilarious evenings they were. And we enjoyed them very much. But he had no need to ask, ‘What did we think of it?’ We were all too ready to say what we thought of it. This was the ethos of the whole thing. That criticism was free.”
Criticism was free, and it could be ferocious. Warren Lewis describes their conversations as “dialectical swordplay” and tells us, “To read to the Inklings was a formidable ordeal.” The language of fighting and warfare is everywhere. Owen Barfield asserts, “You can’t really argue keenly, eagerly, without being a bit aggressive.” Barfield expresses his experience vividly. He says that in conversation with Lewis, he felt like he was “wielding a peashooter against a howitzer.”
Lewis makes no excuses. He says an aggressive approach is something he learned in school, in what he calls “the rough academic arena.” Lewis spent more than two years studying with William T. Kirkpatrick, a strict, logical, and demanding tutor known as the “Great Knock.” This was undoubtedly one of the influences that shaped Lewis’s appetite for intellectual swordplay.
Even praise and appreciation were sometimes expressed using rough, combative language. After reading He Came Down from Heaven, Lewis tells Williams, “You go on getting steadily better ever since you first crossed my path: how do you do it? I begin to suspect that we are living in the ‘age of Williams’ and our friendship with you will be our only passport to fame.” Then Lewis adds, “I’ve a good mind to punch your head when we next meet.”
When the Inklings describe their Thursday meetings, the overwhelming impression is that of great minds equaling and countering one another in grand intellectual battle. Tolkien, for example, describes what he calls a “great event” in November of 1944. Williams, Havard, Barfield, and Lewis were there. Lewis and Barfield launched into an argument, and Tolkien writes, “The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns.”
At another meeting, an argument arose about the proper interpretation of Matthew 7:14, which reads, “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Lewis recalls the event this way: “I had a pleasant evening on Thursday with Williams, Tolkien, and Wrenn, during which Wrenn almost seriously expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people. Tolkien and I agreed afterwards that we just knew what he meant: that as some people … are eminently kickable, so Williams is eminently combustible.”
It is an odd juxtaposition: in the context of a pleasant evening and agreeable conversation, which happens to be about the proper interpretation of scripture, the discussion gathers such intensity that Williams is deemed “combustible” by his close friends.
And that passage from the Bible? Lewis says that the group reached this conclusion: “Our Lord’s replies are never straight answers and never gratify curiosity, and that whatever this one meant its purpose was certainly not statistical.”
This scene was entirely typical. “Criticism was free,” and it seems that of all the company, Charles Williams was most regularly and roundly criticized. In dismissing Taliessin through Logres, for example, Havard summarizes it as “a poem of epic dimensions, very Welsh and of an obscurity beyond belief.” Elsewhere, he confesses “when it came to reading his work, I couldn’t understand a word of it.” Hugo Dyson, never one to mince words, scorned Williams’s poetry as “clotted glory from Charles.”
The Inklings were not the only ones who struggled with Williams’s poems. Both W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot liked Williams as a person and admired the work he did, but even they admit that reading Williams is a challenge. Auden writes, “I must confess that, when I first tried to read his poetry, though as a fellow verse writer I could see its great technical interest, I could not make head or tail of it.” And after reading and rereading one of Williams’s books in manuscript, T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to Williams urging him to revise the table of contents and the introduction and warning him that his complex imagery was so dense and difficult it would frighten the readers away.
When Williams sent Lewis some of his poetry, Lewis responded: “You will not be surprised to learn that I found your poems excessively difficult.” He discusses several of them, offering praise, then continues to grumble about others that he “definitely disliked.”
Lewis concludes this letter unequivocally: “I embrace the opportunity of establishing the precedent of brutal frankness, without which our acquaintance begun like this would easily be a mere butter bath!” The Inklings were committed to avoiding this “butter bath,” and they were intentional in giving real, substantial critique. Once Barfield suggested that Lewis had been too soft on Williams; Lewis countered, “Don’t imagine I didn’t pitch into C. W. for his obscurity for all I was worth.”
The Inklings, and others, accused Williams of being controversial, obscure, complex, and unnecessarily difficult. How did he respond? With gratitude. His views were stretched, his talents matured as he worked within this demanding context. He believed that all this feedback, harsh as it was, helped to keep him on track and improve his work. He expressed his appreciation succinctly, saying, “They are good for my mind.”
But the most intense intellectual battle between Inklings didn’t revolve around Charles Williams. It erupted between Lewis and Barfield, and it started much earlier, years before the Inklings got started.
The “Great War”
Combat was evident at regular Thursday meetings and again in more personal and informal settings. For example, on 26 January 1923, C. S. Lewis was just sitting down to dinner when he was surprised by a knock at his door. It was Owen Barfield. “The unexpected delight gave me one of the best moments I have had,” Lewis writes. “We went at our talk like a dogfight: of Baker, of Harwood, of our mutual news.”
Apparently, good-natured conflict erupted whenever Barfield and Lewis got together. Tolkien says that Barfield “tackled” Lewis, “making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements.” When Lewis summarized their relationship in Surprised by Joy, he characterized Barfield as “the man who disagrees with you about everything.”
Over time, these intellectual skirmishes lengthened and deepened, becoming more formal and moving to the written page. For about nine years, roughly from 1922 to 1931, they sent letters back and forth, arguing about literature, language, poetry, and philosophy. Lewis describes the exchange as “an almost incessant disputation.” They called it the “Great War.”
These letters are not personal. They are really extended formal essays. Their tone is academic, and their language is extremely precise. Some are thickly illustrated with charts and diagrams, and many include numbered lists, articulating specific points of contention. This complex correspondence is full of references to literature, history, theology, and philosophy—both men constantly summarize, quote from, and refer to other thinkers and writers.
One thing stands out in these letters: their arguments were not conclusive. In fact, each one credits the other as having ultimately prevailed. Who won? That is hotly debated. What is unmistakable is this: the “Great War” made a powerful and lasting difference, but not because one of them convinced the other he was right. They listened and they learned. Both Barfield and Lewis clarified their own convictions. They modified their views. They expanded their understanding. Perhaps most importantly, they used these letters, year after year, to sharpen their skills. By exchanging arguments, listening, disagreeing, making adjustments and modifications, they learned how to ask and answer life’s most serious philosophical questions. The impact of this great struggle was profound.
Lewis could not have developed as a religious apologist, novelist, or literary historian if he had not trained his intellect through these many years of extended arguments with his friend.
Barfield gained even more. He asserts that through these letters, Lewis taught him how to think.
His most important book, Poetic Diction, was forged in the context of this long debate. Once the book was completed, Lewis was the first person to read the manuscript. At Barfield’s request, he responded with a long and detailed written analysis. These notes have been lost, so it is impossible to determine exactly how his comments impacted the final work. But we do know that Lewis thought chapter VII, “The Making of Meaning,” was one of the “weakest portions” of the book. After Barfield read Lewis’s comments, he responded by revising the book, then adding a new introduction and writing a whole new chapter to bolster the argument. Honest critique—pointing out shortcomings and suggesting new directions—helped this important book to be the best it could be.
In gratitude, Poetic Diction was dedicated to C. S. Lewis. And the dedication itself emphasizes the kind of influence he provided. Barfield thanks Lewis and then quotes William Blake, saying “Opposition is true friendship.”
Something Better
The power of opposition is seen in other projects, including the changes Charles Williams made to one of his finest novels. The idea for a new book first came to him in May of 1943. He writes, “I now lie at night … with a kind of ghostly skeleton of a novel, and wake scared and unrefreshed.”
He started working on it in mid-June, though he didn’t have much of an idea for the plot. It is a detective story, set against the backdrop of war-torn London. In the opening scene, a young girl’s body is discovered in an empty house. Neighbors believe the house is haunted, and a clairvoyant is brought in to investigate. Williams called this new novel The Noises That Weren’t There.
Williams worked very hard on it and wrote three chapters. Then he read them to Lewis and Tolkien, and he shared them with his wife. All were unanimous in denouncing the draft, so Williams abandoned it. On the 3rd of September, he writes, “Three quarters of my mind is delighted that we are so at one about my discarded chapters; the other quarter is sad about the wasted work. Two months almost thrown away! But perhaps something better may come.”
Hoping for the best, he started over. By the 23rd of September, he had made a new start, and soon he was making good progress. In a letter written on the 5th of October, he reports, “Waking at one … I got on with the novel, & wrote about a thousand words, going to sleep again about four. I hope to do some more this evening.”
He called the new book All Hallows’ Eve. It differs significantly from The Noises That Weren’t There, but they share a number of important features. In both stories, the main character has supernatural abilities. Both include a character named Jonathan Drayton, a painter who is devoted to capturing the effects of light on canvas. And in both books, the plot revolves around a villain who creates human forms out of dust and water.
The key difference between the two novels lies in the way they are structured. The Noises That Weren’t There is littered with extended explanations of hauntings and magic. All Hallows’ Eve uses many of these same ideas, but instead of distracting from the tale, they are incorporated into the narrative and help carry the action forward. Overall, the pace of the story is dramatically improved.
As Williams wrote All Hallows’ Eve, he read it to the Inklings, chapter by chapter, and he continued to revise it in response to their criticism. Many readers consider it one of Williams’s best, and the Inklings played a significant role in it from start to finish. Tolkien notes, “I was in fact a sort of assistant mid-wife at the birth of All Hallows’ Eve, read aloud to us as it was composed, but the very great changes made in it were I think mainly due to C. S. L.” It is worth noting that Tolkien gives the group credit for bringing about “very great changes” and not just superficial adjustments. All Hallows’ Eve was a deeply collaborative effort.
The Missing Chapter
The Noises That Weren’t There is not the only example of a text that the Inklings rejected and the author abandoned. If you pick up a copy of The Lord of the Rings today, it ends with Sam saying, “Well, I’m back.” But that is not where Tolkien ended his story. He wrote one more chapter, an epilogue. It was not an afterthought; it was not tacked on. It was part of his original vision. Christopher Tolkien emphasizes, “It is obvious from the manuscript that the text continued on without break.”
This missing chapter opens about 15 years after Sam has returned from his difficult journey to Mordor and back. He has married Rosie Cotton and settled in Hobbiton with his family. “And one evening in March Master Samwise was taking his ease by a fire in his study, and the children were all gathered about him, as was not at all unusual, though it was always supposed to be a special treat.”
Sam has been reading aloud from a large book on a stand, reading the tales written down in The Red Book of Westmarch, and talking about entwives and Lórien, Legolas, Gimli, Merry, Pippin, and Treebeard.
The children love these stories, and they seem to know them well. Sam’s little son exclaims, “I want to hear about the Spider again. I like the parts best where you come in, dad.” His daughter Elanor asks, “When can I go and see? I want to see Elves, dad, and I want to see my own flower.”
Christopher Tolkien states with some emphasis, “It cannot be doubted that this was how he intended at that time that The Lord of the Rings should end.” Here are the concluding paragraphs as they appear in the final draft of this last chapter:
The stars were shining in a clear dark sky. It was the second day of the bright and cloudless spell that came every year to the Shire towards the end of March, and was every year welcomed and praised as something surprising for the season. All the children were now in bed. It was late, but here and there lights were still glimmering in Hobbiton, and in houses dotted about the night-folded countryside.
Master Samwise stood at the door and looked away eastward. He drew Mistress Rose to him, and set his arm about her.
“March the twenty-fifth!” he said. “This day seventeen years ago, Rose wife, I didn’t think I should ever see thee again. But I kept on hoping.”
“I never hoped at all, Sam,” she said, “not until that very day; and then suddenly I did. About noon it was, and I felt so glad that I began singing. And mother said: ‘Quiet, lass! There’s ruffians about.’ And I said: ‘Let them come! Their time will soon be over. Sam’s coming back.’ And you came.”
“I did,” said Sam. “To the most belovedest place in all the world. To my Rose and my garden.”
They went in, and Sam shut the door. But even as he did so, he heard suddenly, deep and unstilled, the sigh and murmur of the Sea upon the shores of Middle-earth.
This epilogue has charmed the readers who have discovered it tucked away in the pages of The History of Middle-earth. However, when Tolkien finished rewriting and revising The Lord of the Rings and submitted it to his publisher, it did not contain an epilogue. Tolkien explains that he left it out because those he shared it with didn’t like it. He writes, “An epilogue giving a further glimpse (though of a rather exceptional family) has been so universally condemned that I shall not insert it. One must stop somewhere.” There is no specific record of who Tolkien is referring to here: his comment that the epilogue had been “universally condemned” may be a reference to several individual Inklings, or to the Inklings as a group, or to a larger circle that may have included his family and his publisher.
Against his better judgment, Tolkien agreed to drop the entire chapter. But he regretted this decision afterward. When the final volume of The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien protested: “I still feel the picture incomplete without something on Samwise and Elanor, but I could not devise anything that would not have destroyed the ending.” It may be argued that instead of “destroying the ending,” this missing chapter would have provided a sweet and satisfying close to the story. Tolkien thought so, but others disagreed, and so the epilogue, drafted and revised many times, has never been included in the published text.
“Brutally Frank”
All Hallows’ Eve and The Lord of the Rings show that, for better or worse, criticism from the Inklings changed the books they were writing. However, much of the time, the impact of creative opposition is not so easily traced. Although the Inklings made many negative comments about one another’s work, it can be hard to gauge the results of their comments. In his description of one Inklings meeting, for example, Warren Lewis reports that Colin Hardie “read an interminable paper on an unintelligible point about Virgil.” Apparently, Warren Lewis wasn’t the only one who disparaged this particular reading. John Wain remarked, “To say I didn’t understand it is a gross understatement.” In another instance, Warren Lewis attacks Barfield for issuing “withering discourse on the nothingness of the utterness.”
Comments like these give us a record of how the members responded to particular works, and, taken together, they offer a snapshot of what meetings might have been like. Even when there is no record of how a particular comment may have changed a particular manuscript, these criticisms are likely to have stuck with the authors and changed the way they approached new projects. The same is true of criticism that appears in correspondence written after a book or article had already been published. Sometimes criticism impacts the work at hand; sometimes it changes the author.
Barfield gives this account of the process in a letter he wrote criticizing Lewis for redundancies in Perelandra:
When his novel Perelandra appeared, I wrote [to Lewis] praising it highly but making one minor adverse criticism. There is a passage near the beginning of the book where Ransom, the returned space traveler, is endeavoring to describe his feelings about the Green Lady. In order to achieve this, the character in the book makes use of three or four similes one after the other. I complained in my letter that I thought these held up the narrative and were more appropriate for an essay or lecture than a novel.
Lewis responded to Barfield’s critique with ready agreement: “The devil of it is, you’re largely right. Why can I never say anything once?” He continues, tongue in cheek, piling up illustrations of the very flaw he has just been accused of: “‘Two and two make four. These pairs, in union, generate a quaternity, and the duplication of duplicates leaves us one short of five.’ Well, all’s one.” Lewis continues in lighthearted self-mockery, using this same deliberate repetition in two other places in this letter. Clearly, he’s gotten the message. His reply to Barfield is a classic Lewissian retort, both for its humor and for his willingness to accept criticism.
He concludes these playful comments with a quick jab aimed directly at Barfield: “And take that grin off your ugly face.”
Lewis criticized Barfield’s work in turn, challenging him not only about the work at hand, but also making more general observations about the habits of his writing style. In a letter written in 1962, Lewis critiques Barfield’s new book, Worlds Apart. Characteristically, he starts out with lavish praise, emphasizing his enthusiasm for the work. He writes, “My trouble is that [it] is to me so exciting that I can’t help reading it far too quickly. I must presently tackle it again and less greedily.”
Then, without transition or any other fanfare, Lewis launches directly into criticism: “Your language sometimes disgruntles me. Why must it be polyvalence instead of multivalence?” He continues, criticizing a whole host of stylistic matters, pointing out recurring problems with sentence structure and clumsy word choice.
Other comments found in letters and diary entries further demonstrate that the Inklings did not like all that they found in one another’s books. For example, when Warren Lewis read Lewis’s Problem of Pain, he did not find the arguments compelling, nor the conclusion convincing. He writes, “I’ve never seen any explanation of the problem of pain (not even my brother’s) which came near to answering the question for me.”
If The Problem of Pain proved unsatisfying, there are other C. S. Lewis books that Warren Lewis found simply unreadable. He says that Christian Reflections was far above his head. And though he tried, he couldn’t get very far through Studies in Words. He writes, “I’ve also (I’m afraid the only word is ‘waded’) half through J’s Studies in Words but have had to abandon it—far too abstruse for me.”
Tolkien also expresses dislike for quite a number of Lewis’s books. However, in observing this, several cautions are in order. Tolkien describes himself as “a man of limited sympathies.” Elsewhere, he says bluntly, “My taste is not normal.” His preferences were specific, and his standards were high; in short, there are a lot of books by a lot of different authors that Tolkien did not particularly care for.
He takes serious issue with a number of points expressed in Lewis’s book Christian Behavior. Tolkien challenges Lewis primarily on the basis of logical consistency—an area where Lewis is generally seen to be particularly strong—saying he finds a “confusion of thought” within the book itself.
Tolkien also didn’t care for The Great Divorce. “I did not think so well of the concluding chapter of C. S. L.’s new moral allegory or ‘vision,’” he writes. Tolkien never elaborates his reasons. It may be significant that he refers to it as a moral allegory, for he has said bluntly, “I dislike allegory wherever I smell it.” Or it may be a reflection of his distaste for the use of a dream vision as a framing device, an important feature of the book’s concluding chapter.
Tolkien criticized other Lewis books as well. Like Warren Lewis, he reacted strongly to Studies in Words, writing, “Alas! His ponderous silliness is becoming a fixed manner.” He called Letters to Malcolm “a distressing and in parts horrifying work.” He adds, “I began a commentary on it, but if finished it would not be publishable.”
Tolkien’s dislike for some of these books reflects his perspective on a much larger issue: his discomfort with Lewis’s religious writings. Lewis scholar and historian Lyle W. Dorsett writes, “Lewis received much criticism for his preaching, teaching, and writing on Christian topics. Indeed, J. R. R. Tolkien was embarrassed that The Screwtape Letters were dedicated to him.” The reason? Some felt that Lewis, “being neither a theologian nor an ordained clergyman, had no business communicating these subjects to the public.”
Criticism of Lewis’s work as a Christian apologist was widespread among academics at the time. Mary Rogers, a student at Oxford in the 1930s, explains that Lewis’s lectures to those serving in the Royal Air Force and his religious talks on the BBC were seen as a contribution to the war effort and, therefore, grudgingly accepted. However, “The publication of The Problem of Pain in 1940 raised academic eyebrows.” And then Lewis really went too far: “When The Screwtape Letters were published in 1942, with his description as ‘Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford’ on its title page, many of his colleagues were outraged. This was a best-seller. He was employed as a literary scholar, not a popular evangelist!”
Tolkien was well aware of this; in fact, he articulates it clearly and emphatically. In one letter, he takes note of “the extraordinary animosity that C. S. L. seems to excite in certain quarters.” Elsewhere, he elaborates: “No Oxford don was forgiven for writing books outside his field of study—except for detective stories which dons, like everyone else, read when they are down with the ’flu. But it was considered unforgivable that Lewis wrote international best-sellers, and worse still that many were of a religious nature.”
Lewis knew all of this, and it caused him much distress. He once told his friend Harry Blamires, “You don’t know how I’m hated.” His determination to defy academic protocol and openly express his Christian faith did more than alienate his friends and colleagues; it proved hazardous to his career. Lewis was passed over for promotion to two “coveted Chairs in English Literature at his university despite his scholarly claim to the appointments.” It seems certain that his religious writing was the reason.
Clearly, the Inklings could be brutally frank in their critique of one another. Sometimes their words proved invaluable and transformed a work, and sometimes their words were ignored. And still other times, harsh words caused distress and harmed friendships. There is a balance to be met, and the Inklings sometimes failed to find it.
Denouncing Narnia
Though Tolkien attacked a number of Lewis’s books, his strongest objections were aimed straight at The Chronicles of Narnia. There are a number of reasons for Tolkien’s reaction, and they are rather complex.
It was February of 1949 when Lewis read the first three chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Tolkien. He was probably expecting an encouraging and helpful response. Instead, Tolkien said he thought the book was “about as bad as can be.” Soon afterwards, Tolkien was talking with a friend about the story, and he erupted, “It really won’t do, you know! I mean to say: ‘Nymphs and their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun.’ Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?”
When Tolkien condemned the work, Lewis was taken aback. He thought highly of Tolkien’s judgment, and he was astonished and hurt when Tolkien said that he thought the book was “almost worthless.” Despite all his bluster, Lewis cared deeply about the opinions of others, and he relied a great deal on their encouragement. Throughout his letters, there are constant inquiries to friends, colleagues, and students asking whether or not a particular story or poem or other project is “any good” or if a rugged rough draft is “worth working on.” If Lewis had considered Tolkien’s response alone, Narnia might have been abandoned after two or three chapters.
But Lewis decided to give it one more try. On 10 March 1949, he had dinner with his friend and colleague Roger Lancelyn Green. Lewis read him the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When he finished, he told Green that Tolkien had “disliked it intensely,” and then asked, was it any good? Green told him the story was “more than good.” Lewis, greatly encouraged, finished writing the whole novel by the end of the month. And then he continued the series, writing six more.
Tolkien disliked them all. For a long time, scholars and fans have debated why. Many different reasons have been offered.
Some say that Tolkien objected to the way Lewis haphazardly mixed together very different mythologies. David Graham explains, “To put Aslan, the fauns, the White Witch, Father Christmas, the nymphs, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver and the like—all of which had distinct mythological or imaginative origins—into a single imaginative country seemed like a terrible mistake.” Another scholar, Joe R. Christopher, has argued that Tolkien was not concerned about the jumble of mythologies but their distortion. When Tolkien first expresses how much he hates the story, he specifically mentions Tumnus the Faun. Christopher speculates, “Tolkien is thinking in mythological terms—what is a faun? how can one be expected to act?” Tolkien understands that a faun, or satyr, is traditionally a sinister creature; however, in this story, Tumnus is little more than a kindly, conflicted woodland stranger. In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis reduces the grit and complexity of Greco-Roman mythology to the “pleasant level of a child’s story.” Graham and Christopher may be right. At the time Tolkien expressed disdain for the story, he had only heard the first three chapters. His strong reaction—”bad as can be,” “almost worthless,” “disliked intensely”—was aimed specifically against this small beginning.
Others have argued that the real reason is jealousy. In his biography of Tolkien, Carpenter explains that Lewis borrowed certain elements from Tolkien’s work, and Tolkien resented it. His use of “Numinor” in That Hideous Strength is one example; the names “Tor” and “Tinidril” in Perelandra, which are probably drawn from Tolkien’s “Tuor” and “Idril,” is another. Tolkien once told Lewis “it probably makes me at my worst when the other writer’s lines come too near (as do yours at times): there is liable to be a short circuit, a flash, an explosion—and even a bad smell, one ingredient of which may be mere jealousy.”
Carpenter also thinks Tolkien resented the fact that Lewis wrote books so quickly while he struggled day after day to make slow progress with his own work. All seven of the Narnia books were written and published in seven years, but The Lord of the Rings took nearly twice that long. It may be that Tolkien envied Lewis for his speed and fluency. Or it may be that Tolkien’s discomfort with Lewis’s haste was not jealousy but rather the conviction that these stories were carelessly constructed and littered with gaps and inconsistencies.
It may be that the mixing of mythologies, or jealousy, or carelessness, or some combination of these concerns, accounts for Tolkien’s strong negative reaction. There is evidence for all of them; all are plausible. But in his article “Disparaging Narnia,” Josh B. Long points out that we have only one comment directly from Tolkien stating a specific reason for not liking these books. It comes from an unpublished letter, written in 1971. In it, Tolkien tells a reader, “I am glad you have discovered Narnia. These stories are deservedly very popular; but since you ask if I like them I am afraid the answer is No. I do not like ‘allegory’, and least of all religious allegory of this kind. But that is a difference of taste which we both recognized and did not interfere with our friendship.”
It is well known that Tolkien disliked allegory. He is quite clear on the matter. He writes, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” Elsewhere he says, “My mind does not work allegorically.” And once more: “Allegory is entirely foreign to my thought.”
Straightforward enough. But here, too, there is a complicating factor. As Tom Shippey points out, even though he protests loud and clear, “the evidence is rather against Tolkien here.” Tolkien used allegory in his nonfiction (“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”), his poetry (“Doworst”), and his fiction (“Leaf by Niggle”). He translated, studied, wrote about, and taught allegory, too.
Still, Tolkien states directly and unequivocally that it is the allegory, specifically the “religious allegory,” in The Chronicles of Narnia that accounts for his reaction to these books. What is striking about his comment, though, is the way this remark contrasts with his earlier assessment. Both are sharp, and both are quite negative. But in 1949, Tolkien said the book was “about as bad as can be.” In 1971, he affirmed that the book was “deservedly very popular,” even though personally he didn’t care for it.
One small biographical detail supports the notion that Tolkien had a change of heart. When his granddaughter Joanna came to visit, he handed her a small pile of books from his bookshelf, including Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Andrew Lang’s fairy stories, and Lewis’s Narnia books. He recommended them all and urged her to read them.
Apparently, Tolkien’s assessment was revised. As Long explains it, “Tolkien remained indifferent to Narnia, but conceded that there was value in the books for others.”
At the age of 72, Tolkien writes, “It is sad that ‘Narnia’ and all that part of C. S. L.’s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy.” It came down to a matter of personal taste. He is not scornful, angry, critical, or contemptuous. He is simply sad that he is unable to appreciate his friend’s work.
Denigrating The Lord of the Rings
When it comes to arguing and criticizing, the Inklings present us with a paradox. There is a powerful sense of play and sheer pleasure in the “thrust and parry” of intellectual combat. There are many, many works (poems, plays, novels, essays, lectures, and more) that were strengthened, saved, or significantly improved by the hard-hitting criticism of the group.
But feelings did get hurt. Toes got stepped on. Whether they were giving advice or receiving it, they didn’t always get it right. That is nowhere more evident than with the one book most at the heart of the work of the Inklings.
Tolkien began The Lord of the Rings in December of 1937, and he completed the typescript in 1949. That means Tolkien was writing his “new Hobbit” for most of the time that the Inklings were meeting. The book occupied a prominent place, year after year, in the course of their meetings. While the group was generally enthusiastic about it, there were dissenting voices.
John Wain, who complained about a lot of things, complained about this, too. Wain writes, “When Tolkien came through the door at a meeting of the Inklings with a bulging jacket pocket, I winced because I knew we were in for a slab of Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins and the rest of it. I wished him no harm, but would have preferred him to keep his daydreams within bounds and not inflict them on us.” When Wain was asked what he thought of Middle-earth, he replied, “The fact is that I don’t think anything of it. It has, and had, nothing to say to me. It presents no picture of human life that I can recognize.”
There are others who agreed with him. Owen Barfield is reported to have said, “I know this wouldn’t be a popular thing, but I just can’t get into that Lord of the Rings trilogy. I cannot finish it. I just can’t get through it.” R. E. Havard remembers struggling “to pick up the thread of the story” when he first heard The Lord of the Rings read out loud. He borrowed the typescript copy and found that, reading it at his own pace, he was able to “savor its compulsive character.” “Still,” he writes, “there have always been those who have found it hard to take.”
Although Wain, Barfield, and Havard all struggled with the book, Hugo Dyson was by far its most outspoken critic. To some extent, this is Dyson’s claim to fame. David Bratman puts it strongly: “If Hugo Dyson is remembered for one thing by Inklings readers, it’s as the guy who didn’t like The Lord of the Rings.” Others clearly agree. A. N. Wilson says that Dyson “felt a marked antipathy to Tolkien’s writings.” And Joe R. Christopher has referred to Dyson as “the anti-resonator.”
Why such emphatic statements? It is not just that Dyson was loud in his manner and derogatory in his comments. By the spring of 1947, Dyson had become so fed up with The Lord of the Rings that he began to exercise a kind of “veto” against any more readings.
Things got so bad that if Dyson was present at an Inklings meeting, Tolkien would not read. And if Dyson arrived late and a reading was already in progress, Tolkien would stop and put the manuscript away.
Stories about Dyson’s vehement objection to The Lord of the Rings have circulated for years. Perhaps the best authority on the matter is Christopher Tolkien. In one of the few firsthand accounts of this conflict, he describes the situation this way:
Well, I should mention the very important figure of Hugo Dyson, who was an English don, English Literature at Oxford. Brilliant, vastly entertaining man who didn’t like The Lord of the Rings. I remember this very vividly, my father’s pain, his shyness, which couldn’t take Hugo’s extremely rumbustious approach. Hugo wanted fun, jokes, witticisms, lots of drink. And Lewis, who I deeply admired and loved—he had a strong, a strong manner. And he would say “Shut up Hugo. [claps hands] Come on Tollers.” And The Lord of the Rings would begin with Hugo lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, “Oh God, no more Elves.” The Inklings was a bit like that.
Evidently, Dyson’s impact was not popular—Warren Lewis calls it “unfair”—but the Inklings were not able to coax Tolkien to continue his reading if Dyson was in the room.
Tolkien kept writing, of course, so in the long run, Dyson’s carping made little difference to The Lord of the Rings. However, it did change the
Inklings. After Dyson began to veto Tolkien’s reading, Thursday night meetings began to wind down. In attacking these readings, Dyson was attacking the very reason for the group; in limiting the participation of one of its members, Dyson eroded its spirit. It is one thing to criticize an author. It is another to shut him down. There is a difference between conflict and contempt. Dyson delivered an axe blow to the root of the tree. The Inklings were shaken, and they never quite recovered.
DOING WHAT THEY DID: There are two characteristics of strong creative groups: a passionate interest in the same things and a variety of personalities and diverse points of view. Without the first, there will be no glue to hold things together. Without the second, the participants won’t have the benefit of multiple talents and perspectives and they won’t get enough help to make a real difference.
But encouraging difference will mean conflict. It may seem that the most important way to protect the dynamics of a group is to strike the right balance between positive and negative, between encouragement and correction. But it is far more important to see the difference between correction that is helpful and condemnation that is dismissive and, therefore, destroys.
