Philip Pullman, while best known for his critique of Lewis, takes an even dimmer view of Tolkien on this count. Having concocted his own alternate universe in which to set His Dark Materials, he finds himself bemused by readers who want to explore it. “This is a particular kind of interest that I’ve never had,” he told me, “and it’s not a literary interest. I could never care less how many miles Middle-earth is from the Shire or whatever it is, or what’s the past participle of a certain word in Klingon.” When readers ask for explanations of the finer points of his imaginary cosmology, he’s flummoxed. “I haven’t got an answer because I’m not interested. It doesn’t matter. What I’m interested in is telling a story. The world is there for me to tell a story in, not for its own sake.”
Several decades of inept, derivative fantasy novels and the nerdy reputation of Tolkien fandom have fortified the ranks of Tolkien naysayers. A lot of them find the whole Middle-earth ambience icky and a little sad. (I have a friend who refuses flat-out to read anything involving elves.) Tolkien has had many admirers of considerable intellectual stature — Auden was his great champion in the press, and the novelist Iris Murdoch sent him fan mail — but this, too, doesn’t go very far in persuading other intelligent people who can’t abide his books. Murdoch perhaps chose the wisest course when her husband, the Oxford professor John Bayley, would demand to know how she could be so enthralled by books that were so “fantastically badly written”: she’d stare at him in amazement and insist that she didn’t know what he was talking about.
Lewis and Tolkien certainly felt that they were surrounded by hostile forces. Explaining his own love of “fairy tales” may not have been as central a project for Lewis as was defending the faith, but he gave the cause plenty of energy all the same. Tolkien, too, attempted an apologia, although criticism was really not his forte. His essay “On Fairy Stories,” apart from introducing the concept of “sub-creation,” isn’t much more developed than Lewis’s own writings on the topic — just harder to follow; Tolkien’s expository writing has none of Lewis’s limpid clarity. “I am not a critic,” he once wrote to Lewis, and “On Fairy Stories” is evidence that he understood the limits of his own talents very well. He wrote it in part because he felt that he’d been “unnaturally galvanized” into the critical role during all the time he’d spent with Lewis and “the brotherhood.”
“On Fairy Stories” emerged in large part from the long conversations the two friends had in Lewis’s rooms. Lewis had a fathomless appetite for informal debate, the honing and teasing out of philosophical positions and arguments. He had, remember, aspired to a fellowship in philosophy before settling for English. It was via that late-night talk with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in 1931 that he’d converted (or at least that’s what he chose to believe), and the arguments that convinced him were related to ideas that he and Tolkien shared about the merit of fairy tales.
Lewis had been leaning back toward Christianity for a while, but he needed someone to help him dismantle the intellectual apparatus he’d constructed, years earlier, to justify his agnosticism; he was too stubborn, and too convinced of his own rationality, to toss all that away without a fight. Tolkien handed him the concept that did the trick, an idea that in one fell swoop redeemed his lifelong enthusiasm for pagan legends and conclusively refuted the naysayers who accused the two of them of playing about with a lot of childish moonshine.
Tolkien persuaded Lewis that the stories he’d thrilled to all his life — about sacrificed and reborn gods like Balder or Dionysus — were really like echoes moving backward and sideways and sometimes even forward in time, reverberations of the one occasion when God actually sacrificed himself for mankind. The other stories, made by men, weren’t “lies” (or, as Lewis liked to call them, “lies breathed through silver”); they were shadows of the single instance when the myth “really happened.” People had kept on inventing such shadows, conjuring up imaginary worlds, because human beings were made in the image of a God who was above all a creator, an artist. With this in mind, Lewis could believe in Christ as the Son of God and not give up the other myths he loved so much — the fairy tales, the epics, the “northernness.” Those stories, like Middle-earth itself, were not “real,” but they were nevertheless “true.” They were reflections of the one and only myth that had actually unfolded in history, the one instance when the eternal, transcendent truth of God and the fallen world of reality had been one and the same.
Chapter Twenty
The Second Love
Not long after Lewis had that momentous conversation with Tolkien and Dyson on Addison’s Walk, Tolkien wrote a poem entitled “Mythopoeia,” putting into verse his conviction that creating “mythic” art was a more authentic means of pursuing truth than the “dusty path” of science and progress. The poem is addressed from “Philomythus” (“Myth lover” — Tolkien) to “Misomythus” (“Myth hater” — Lewis), but what it has to say is less revealing than the fact that it was written at all. Why write a poem arguing points with a man you’ve just spent hours talking to directly, a friend you speak to at least once (and usually several times) a week?
The practice of poetic conversation between close friends reached its zenith with the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, and with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in particular. Some of their most famous poems were extensions of their conversations; the autobiographical impulse of the early Romantics often transformed poetry into a higher form of letter. Wordsworth’s “A Complaint,” for example, written in 1806, is just that, a protest against “a change in the manner of a friend,” after Coleridge returned from a long journey withdrawn and preoccupied; Coleridge’s “To William Wordsworth,” written not long afterward, voices his renewed awe at his friend’s gifts and his own fears of artistic inadequacy. Although Tolkien had very little interest in “modern” (i.e., post-Chaucerian) poetry, and had remained impervious to the charms of Keats despite the best efforts of one of his old school friends, he could hardly help soaking up at least a little of the late-Victorian notion of the poet’s life, epitomized by the Romantics.
As Paris in the twenties was to young writers and other bohemians of the late twentieth century, so were Romantic friendships like that between Wordsworth and Coleridge to literary men from Lewis and Tolkien’s generation. The Romantics provided a model for a certain kind of relationship (and by extension, community) based on shared creative dreams and the desire to get beyond conventional manners and roles. As often happens with all-pervading cultural fantasies, even if you’re too embarrassed, too modest, or even too cynical to invoke the model openly, it’s still hard to escape it entirely. Writing is a lonely profession, especially when you feel out of step with your time, whether you believe you’re ahead of it (as Wordsworth and Coleridge did) or behind it (Tolkien and Lewis). The later Romantics — Keats, Shelley, and Byron — may have racked up more dramatic, glamorous histories than Wordsworth and Coleridge, but none of them could claim a more consuming, fertile, or tempestuous collaboration. In their heyday, these two friends managed to make writing an almost communal activity.
They met in 1795, and for a little less than a decade they were united in an effort to revolutionize English poetry. At the peak of their friendship, Coleridge and Wordsworth worked side by side at the same table in various rural cottages throughout England, but especially in Coleridge’s cottage in Somerset. They read their work aloud to each other, exchanged criticism, and even contributed lines or entire stanzas to each other’s poems. The foundation of their bond was Coleridge’s certitude that in Wordsworth he had found the consummate literary genius of their time, the man destined to write a long, comprehensive, philosophical poem that would champion a new way of life and in doing so change the world. With Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, and a rotating selection of sympathetic friends, the two men went on epic walks through the countryside, fervently talking of ideas and poetry and opening their hearts and minds to the natural world in search of the same emotional and spiritual transport that, a hundred years later, Lewis would name Joy.