Lewis was “a man of immense power and industry,” Tolkien wrote to a reader who had noticed some correspondences between the space trilogy and The Lord of the Rings, “but at last my slower and more meticulous (as well as more indolent and less organized) machine has produced its effort.” Until it did, however, only a writer of angelic forbearance could have witnessed his friend’s blossoming career without a twinge of envy. It didn’t help that when Lewis incorporated some little element of Tolkien’s mythology into his own fiction, he’d often get it wrong, such as misspelling “Númenor” (an Atlantean civilization from the distant past of Middle-earth) as “Numinor.” That, and the elvish-inflected names that Lewis invented for the supernatural entities in his science-fiction novels, irritated his friend, though he knew Lewis intended it as a tribute.
What sustained the Tolkien and Lewis friendship was their affection for old things and old ways of life, and above all their love of old literary forms. This, too, was something they had in common with the Romantics. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, a groundbreaking collection of poems by both Wordsworth and Coleridge, published in 1798, Wordsworth spoke for both men in denouncing “poets, who think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation.” This expresses pretty well how Lewis felt about modernism, personified for him by the poet T. S. Eliot, whose work he once repudiated as “a very great evil.”
Lewis, it must be said, never took the time to understand the modernist writers properly; he didn’t think that he needed to. He was sure that Eliot’s “poems of disintegration” were morally dangerous: “I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading The Waste Land,” he declared, “but that most men are by it infected with chaos.” As Wordsworth had in his own time, Lewis believed that the literary establishment (for that is what he considered the modernists to be) had instituted and then slavishly followed an assortment of highfalutin fashions that cut them off from “the sympathies of men.”
Lyrical Ballads returned to songs and legends rooted in English folk culture for inspiration, rejecting the mannered, elaborate classical allusions that reigned in the poetry of the previous generation. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t as convinced as Wordsworth and Coleridge were that they had “the sympathies of men” on their side, but they knew that the stories they preferred — whether fairy tales, heroic sagas, or pulp adventure yarns — were the sort of thing people had been writing and enjoying for millennia. The modernists, by contrast, prided themselves on being original, on discarding obsolete literary forms and subject matter that imposed a false coherence on the tumult of twentieth-century life. Indeed, modernism defined itself in part by its rejection of the nineteenth-century cult of Romanticism, whose focus on the transcendent self embodied in the artist Eliot dismissed as sentimental and solipsistic. Romantic individualism, Eliot wrote, could lead its disciples “only back upon themselves.”
Lewis believed that the modernists were both snobs and parvenus. While he certainly championed “the masters” against the assaults of such upstarts, he was not a social critic in the contemporary vein of Alan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind. Lewis would never have defined himself as a defender of high culture against the crass rabble, the kind of conservative who trumpets “Great Books” and the work it takes to read them. Instead, he saw himself as an antimandarin, a defender of old-fashioned readerly pleasures. He had, after all, read most of the English-language classics, even the ones that make today’s undergraduates groan and reach for the Cliffs Notes, purely for the fun of it.
Modernist novelists who wanted to abandon conventional story- telling as an oppressive, arbitrary, and outdated convention, were, in Lewis’s eyes, the real enemies of both the literary classics and the common folk. They were the same sort of people who sneered at him for liking The Wind in the Willows and H. G. Wells. Reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, he admired her “astonishing power of rendering the feel both of landscapes and moods, rising sometimes to real loveliness” but complained of “a total absence of any matter on which to use the power.” He thought he detected in the modernist project a debilitating fear of vulgarity. “The reason why they don’t like either the narrative elements or low comedy,” he wrote to Dorothy Sayers, “is that these have obvious immediate entertainment value. These prigs, starting from the true proposition that great art is more than entertainment, reach the glaring non sequitur, ‘entertainment has no place in great art.’”
But while Lewis took it upon himself to defend Shelley from the critical disapproval of Eliot and his coterie, there was one aspect of Romanticism for which he had no use: its revolutionary fervor. Shelley was a notorious atheist, Coleridge a would-be socialist, and even Wordsworth had been exhilarated by the French Revolution before it went off the rails. At no point in his life would Lewis ever have written, as Wordsworth once did, “I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified. Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species I think must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement.” Lewis and Tolkien didn’t believe in progress or “human improvement.” Man had fallen and only God could fix that.
Chapter Twenty-one
Marvelous Journeys
Tolkien’s intellectual battles were more esoteric than his friend’s — he had, for example, a serious quarrel with anyone who regarded Anglo-Saxon poetry as no more than a means to study the Old English language, rather than as literature in its own right. But where he and Lewis coincided most happily was in their affinity for the venerable literary form known as the romance. (This was, of course, before the term “romance” was adopted as a label for the genre of pulp fiction devoted to fantasies of courtship.) Much that frustrates and baffles certain readers about their work has to do with confusion over what the two men intended to write. Their books may look like novels, but in essence they are romances.
When critics complain, as Edmund Wilson did, about the morally simplistic characterization in The Lord of the Rings, or its focus on mere adventure, or the pervasive unreality of its heroic deeds and magical beings, they are pointing out that Tolkien’s book is not a very good novel, and there is truth to that. The Lord of the Rings has no character to equal Jane Eyre or Raskolnikov, none of the sophisticated moral humanism of Huckleberry Finn — and certainly nothing approaching the stylistic bravado of Lolita. But if The Lord of the Rings doesn’t excel in any of these novelistic arenas, that’s largely because it isn’t trying to. “My work is not a ‘novel,’” Tolkien wrote testily to one would-be student of his book, “but an ‘heroic romance,’ a much older and quite different variety of literature.” As for Lewis, although he called the Chronicles “fairy tales” rather than romances, he saw the genres as deeply related, at times indistinguishable.
One “modern” author whom both Lewis and Tolkien held in esteem was William Morris. This Victorian dynamo was the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, a political activist, historical preservationist, member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, fine-press publisher, translator, travel writer, poet, painter, designer, architect, and, in his final years, the author of eight “prose romances,” works of fiction that made him the “great author” of C. S. Lewis’s youth and first gave Tolkien the idea to write romances of his own. Morris is now best known for his textile and wallpaper designs, rich, intricate botanicals inspired by medieval tapestries, many of which you can still buy today. His role as pioneer of the socialist movement in Britain makes him interesting to political historians. The prose romances are probably the most dimly remembered of all his accomplishments; they have often been regarded as a kind of holiday he took from more significant pursuits. Nevertheless, it may well be through Morris’s tales of questing knights and valiant Germanic heroes that he has had, indirectly, the greatest influence of all.