The third novel, That Hideous Strength, finds Ransom back on Earth, where the conflict has been transferred and now manifests itself in an ordinary struggle in a university town between a very modern National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) and some ancient traditions and institutions, including the seer Merlin, buried beneath the ground. There is also a group of animals that derive the kind of comfort from Ransom’s presence among them that the birds used to receive from Saint Francis. One of these, the bear, Mr. Bultitude, is quite capable of breaking your heart. In fact, your heart may not survive reading this wonderful concluding novel of the series. And when the great angels come, swimming through the murkiness of air, you will gasp, as Dante gasped to see the Angel come down into Hell to quiet the demons so that he might pass.
Indeed, there is every sort of echo and reminder in these three fine books of literary events, and of religious ones as well. Dante and Milton somehow stand in the background, applauding this use of them by the Oxford scholar; and the Bible and Aquinas are part of the chorus, too. The more you know about Christian apologetics and about classical literature, the better will these three books seem to you. But they will be very satisfying reading whatever you know, or do not know.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
1882–1933
The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien, born in England in 1892, was a professor of English language and literature at Oxford for many years. He published several philological studies—of Beowulf, for example—and was known by his friends and students as a retiring and very learned, almost timid, man. But one of his friends knew he was something very different, and as it turned out, very great. The friend was C.S. Lewis, his colleague at Oxford, who was the only one who knew that Tolkien had been working for many years on two books that are based on a mythology all his own.
The first of the books was The Hobbit. Hobbits live in the Shire, which is like the English countryside but not quite. If you stand in the middle of a pleasant English meadow and look around you at the grass and the trees and perhaps a sparkling little stream meandering in the near distance you may not see the Hobbits who live there, because they are not visible to us unless … well, unless Professor Tolkien tells us about them.
As it turns out, the Shire is threatened by a terrible force that has to be overcome by two of the Hobbits, the redoubtable Frodo and his friend and servant, Sam. Of course Frodo and Sam can’t defend their world all by themselves, but they find glorious allies, both men and women (and trees, as well, who speak to them). Their foe also has vicious allies that “fly through the night in the howling storm,” to quote a great poem by William Blake, who would have loved Tolkien. There is a Ring, of course, that Frodo loses and must find again, with Sam’s help, and then must throw into the great fire at the center of the mountain of their enemy. Of course they succeed …
I probably don’t have to say any more, because you or your children have probably seen the three Lord of the Rings films that were made in New Zealand and distributed worldwide. Since I’m a Hobbit myself I have to admit I didn’t like the films as much as I liked the books when I read them for the first time many years ago, but that is by the by.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
1896–1940
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, the son of relatively impecunious parents who nevertheless managed to send him to St. Paul’s and Princeton. The experience may have been good for his intellect, but the moral lesson was, unfortunately, too clear to him: the rich, of whom he was not one, were unlike him, which is to say that they could afford to enjoy life whereas he could not. At Princeton his discontent was multiplied by the fact that he failed to make the football team.
So he left without a degree and joined the army. Again life deprived him of a rich reward: he was not sent overseas. Instead he was stationed in Alabama. There he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, but her family would not take a poor man to its bosom. There were many things to complain of, and Fitzgerald returned to the writing that he had begun at Princeton. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920, after the famous editor Maxwell Perkins had told him to take home the first draft and completely rewrite it. The book was an instant success; it seemed to express the hidden desires and fears of an entire new generation of frustrated and rebellious youth. Fitzgerald now had an income, and Zelda agreed to be his wife.
Two volumes of short stories and a second novel, all published by 1922, helped to establish Fitzgerald as a leading spokesman of his time. But none of these books was really very good. The true genius of Scott Fitzgerald was revealed in 1925, with the publication of The Great Gatsby. It marked the peak of the young author’s achievement, and from then on everything was downhill. He spent the next ten years wandering about Europe and America, often drunk, almost always morose, in part because of the increasing insanity of Zelda. Tender Is the Night appeared in 1933, but it was largely ignored (although I liked it very much when I read it in Paris years ago). Fitzgerald was determined to make money if he could not have fame. He went to Hollywood and lost his soul there, as so many had done before him and would after him. He was struggling to finish still another novel when he died in Hollywood late in 1940. He remains to this day the very symbol of his time.
The extraordinary thing about The Great Gatsby is that it reveals that its author understood all these things perfectly clearly, although he was unable to act on that understanding. Jay Gatsby, like his creator, is even more a symbol than he is a man. He too pursues an unattainable goal; he too is defeated by the reality of life, against which he has no defense. The famous last lines of the book express this:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The book is American to the core. In it, rich and poor seem to converge, to touch, but in reality they never do. In it, everyone is obsessed with money and hope; if they lose one, they also lose the other. In it, there is the constant refrain of expectation: a solution to every problem is just around the corner.
These are not only American feelings and fears; they are human. It is the humanity of Gatsby, as compared to the relative inhumanity of Tom and Daisy, the man he befriends and the woman he loves, that shores up the book and establishes its power. The language would be different, the names, the occupations, the preoccupations, if this story took place in another time, another place. But the basic human aspirations and the suffering would be the same.