The Inklings Corner at the Eagle and Child Pub (the “Bird and Baby”), Oxford. It was here that the Inklings met for many years. Photo credit: Tom Murphy VII.
I posted some comments a few days ago about Prof. Bruce Charlton’s writings on Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers. I learned quite a bit reading what he wrote, and it even sparked a thought of my own, somewhere in that dank cauliflower of cholesterol that I call my brain.
It’s well known that Lewis’s and Tolkien’s friendship cooled in their later years. Tolkien was disappointed in the Chronicles of Narnia, complaining that Lewis had sunk to mere allegory. And when Lewis married Joy Davidman, Tolkien considered her rude, abrasive, and just another in a long string of parasites who took advantage of his friend’s generous nature.
About Joy Davidman I’ve got nothing to say at this time. But I think I understand now why Tolkien was so upset about the Narnia books.
“Jack” Lewis and “Tollers” Tolkien were always the heart of the Inklings writers’ group. And when they began working in parallel as fiction writers, they were operating purposefully on a joint project—the re-evangelization of England through the production of authentic myth.
Lewis was the first fruits of Tolkien’s dream. When Tolkien helped his friend to understand his own view of myth, that it was a road to the gospel through “good dreams” that prepared souls for the work of the Holy Spirit, Lewis responded by embracing the Christian faith. Their shared dream was to produce a mythology that would provide a similar road for the whole country. Ancestral memory would draw the English to this myth, because it would not be a fiction, but a genuine restoration of something lost.
Tolkien didn’t believe that his Legendarium was some product of his subconscious. He believed that the images that came to him in dreams were actual visions sent from heaven. He saw his writing as a kind of prophetic work.
Although their work habits were very different, Tolkien and Lewis found inspiration in similar sources. Both of them worked from images seen in dreams. It would appear (if I understand correctly) that Tolkien took the visions more seriously.
Because Lewis, after writing three science fiction novels that harmonized well with Tolkien’s vision (especially That Hideous Strength), decided to take his dream images in a different direction. A lion in a dream became Aslan, and a series of children’s books were created, which had nothing whatever to do with Numenor or Middle Earth.
Tolkien must have felt betrayed. Abandoned by a comrade. Frodo without Sam, Legolas without Gimli (or vice versa).
I’m not qualified to judge if his dream was a possibility.
But it unquestionably did not succeed as he envisioned it.
This is the first that I can recall hearing that Tolkien or Lewis wrote from dreams, or the specifics of a coordinated evangelism. That is not quite the impression I got from The History of Middle-earth, including the Notion Club Papers, or of the biographies I’ve read.
There was an evangelistic hope – and it worked for me. But it was an indirect sort of thing, best understood perhaps from _On Fairy Stories_ and _Leaf by Niggle_.
Joy Davidman was divorced, that is a married woman, and Tolkien was not at all happy to see his friend living in adultery. Nor was he happy with the influence the occultist Charles Williams had begun to have on Lewis. None of that group liked that Lewis insisted on bringing Joy – after for so many years insisting that the others could not bring their wives.
The chief issue that I’m aware of that Tolkien had with the Narnia Chronicles is that they are such a hodge-podge of various myths, rather than a consistent subcreation.
That is a very interesting idea, strongly implied by the known facts, but which I hadn’t previously considered.
I expect that Tolkien was typical of most men, in that his major friendships were based around a common ‘project’ – and were a kind of alliance.
This meant that Tolkien had relatively few friends (although he was highly sociable), because the criteria for friendship were so restrictive; but these friendships were very intense.
It was his son Christopher who replaced Lewis – the father-son friendship emerged as a theme from the Lost Road and Notion Club Papers onwards, as Christopher entered his teens and Tolkien gradually recognized the very special bond between himself and his youngest son.
*
Lewis, by contrast, had many friends, many of whom were so different from himself that they were working on ‘projects’ that were actually in opposition to his own, or subversive of his own. Yet he seemed not to depend on any of these friends but pursued his own autonomous and changing line.
Tolkien was very disturbed and distressed by Lewis’s laxity on the matter of sexual morals – for example, Lewis’s liberal views on divorce.
And Lewis was systematically dishonest/ evasive and self-deceptive about his own sexual life – as can be seen with Mrs Moore, and later with Joy – his astonishing capacity for willful blindness about ‘what was happening’, very obviously, as he was progressively coaxed into marriage with Joy was even remarked upon by Warnie in his diary.
He did not even tell Tolkien he was married (he read it in the newspapers) – which would have been more surprising except that this was a lifelong pattern of concealment.
*
But intense male friendship based on an alliance is unstable, and usually temporary – as was the case with Tolkien and the surviving TCBS member Christopher Wiseman – which degenerated from a mutual project to save England from spiritual death, into a comfortable and nostalgic – but infrequent – companionship.
So, we should count ourselves fortunate that Tolkien and Lewis shared an intense friendship for so many years as they did; enough time substantially to accomplish what they set out to accomplish in providing us, later generations, with the material we need to reconnect with the mythical past.
The question of Joy’s divorce was settled in the eyes of the church when it was discovered that her husband, William Gresham, had been married once before his marriage to Joy. This rendered her marriage null under canon law. But I don’t suppose Tolkien was privy to that information. As a Catholic, he might not have cared.
@SS – “Nor was [Tolkien] happy with the influence the occultist Charles Williams had begun to have on Lewis.”
This is not true of the time when Williams was alive, as can be seen by uniformly positive references to C.W. in letters etc – but was a later change in Tolkien’s view of CW, probably from the later 1950s after Tolkien read the biography of CW by AM Hadfield, or the introduction to C.W’s selected essays by Anne Ridler (which contained revelations and hints of C.W’s occult activities and philandering).
I have another theory about what may have caused an estrangement between Tolkien & Lewis.
From what I’ve heard, Tolkien had something to do with Lewis becoming a Christian. Yet, he is not mentioned at all in Surprised by Joy, which Lewis wrote about his conversion.
Could Tolkien have been hurt by that omission?
What is this about Lewis’ habit of concealing his morals, Mrs. Moore and Joy? Does Jacobs touch on it in his book, The Narnian?
@Phil – http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-greatest-mystery-of-cs-lewiss-life.html
The pub room wide angle photo above is very misleading. I was at that pub several times and that front room was very tiny and I preferred to go further in and sit somewhere more comfortable and spacious with my fish and chips and cider.
Tolkien was never impressed with religious language as it was very inadequate in expressing the human spirit. Christ restored divinity within humanity and it manifests itself in a living presence that eclipses contrived linguistic description. The Word became flesh and the Light of Life calls the human spirit into its Divinity and is measured by how far it ascends to and/or descends from Christ the Reincarnate Man.
Brad,
Where do you find those concepts of Christ in the Bible? Or even in Tolkien? The idea that divinity exists or has been restored within humanity sounds more like a fringe cult group than orthodox Christianity. The Bible teaches us to worship, serve and obey God, not to become a god or find divinity within ourselves.
Going back to the beginning, the first temptation Satan offered to Eve was to be like God. Many false teachers today offer the same error leading many astray. We need to be careful to uphold the truth.
With regard to Dr. Charlton’s comment on C. S. Lewis’s “liberal” view of divorce:
1.Without checking up on the matter, I believe that Joy Gresham’s husband was sexually unfaithful to her.
2.I believe that, in the Old Testament Law, Bill Gresham would have been liable to be put to death. His wife would then have been free to marry again, in fact would probably have been expected to marry again. In the OT, then, the innocent person in a case of marital unfaithfulness is going to be a widow/widower.
3.The Lutheran reformers and many others who subjected the Roman Catholic prohibition of divorce to biblical critique argued on the basis of 1 Corinthians etc. that the innocent party may divorce the unfaithful spouse and remarry. The Orthodox permit second, third, and even fourth marriages now (vide Timothy Ware), although they may have been more like the RC formerly.
4.There is thus good reason to argue that the Lewis-Joy situation was not really complicated, from a biblical point of view. If one holds to the Roman Catholic view, well, Joy could not very well, as a non-RC, apply to Rome for an annulment, which seems to have been a RC development that makes its overly strict view of divorce more tolerable.
PS In mentioning Eastern Orthodox practice in the same paragraph, I didn’t mean to indicate that I associate it with the Lutheran understanding. I was thinking, but did not say explicitly, that the marriage of Lewis and Joy after her divorce from Gresham suggests a liberal view on divorce from the point of view of official Roman Catholic dogma, but not from that of some other Christian parties. I personally endorse the Lutheran view (it is not limited to Lutherans), but the EO view as expressed by Timothy/Kallistos Ware sounds too permissive.
This is probably not the place for an extended discussion of divorce and remarriage issues. This will be my final comment on the topic, attached to this posting. My thanks to Lars for the hospitality extended to Dr. Charlton, myself, and others.
Joy’s husband Bill was, as Dave pointed out, an adulterer. He was also abusive in some instances (hitting her).
Her conversion to Christianity was sparked by a phone call she received from him when he had run off and suffered a nervous breakdown.
From what I’ve read he was quite the crappy husband.
I also wonder if Tolkein’s problems with Joy were cultural. He was British Oxford professor, and she was an American woman from New York.
It is not a matter of *law* – whether secular or canon law – to attribute an element of Tolkien’s hostility to Lewis’s marriage to concern over divorce; it is a matter of Tolkien’s heartfelt, visceral opposition to divorce, and his disagreement with Lewis on this point.
Number 49 of the 1981 selected Letters of Tolkien is a draft written in response to Lewis’s book Christian Behaviour (1943) in which a dual system of secular and Christian marriage is proposed.
What comes through is that Tolkien is very unhappy about Lewis’s whole approach to this matter, not just his specific proposals. Clearly Tolkien thinks Lewis treats the whole matter of divorce without sufficient seriousness – that Lewis is taking a glib and superficial line on this subject.
And indeed, Lewis’s behaviour – playing around the borders of what was, and was not, secular marriage and a legal marriage…
with Lewis’s earlier purely legal marriage, to prevent Joy being deported; followed by a later Christian marriage in defiance of the Bishop of Oxford’s refusal of permission to marry.
Tolkien would certainly have regarded this an absolutely wrong way to behave in relation to a Holy Sacrament.
It is against this background that we must interpret Tolkien’s apparently cold response to Lewis’s marriage to a divorcee. It would seem like confirmation and embrace of of what Tolkien had for some time regarded as a serious moral defect in Lewis.
But – even setting that aside – it would be remarkable to discover from reading the newspaper that a supposed best friend had apparently been going through a courtship and was now already married – and had not told you about it!
That fact would reveal to Tolkien at a blow, how far from him Lewis had by then already drifted. The damage had been done.
I think this is hard for most modern readers to grasp. We’re accustomed to thinking of Lewis as exceptionally narrow and legalistic on sexual matters. It’s a measure of how much the world has changed.
Hm.
@Lars
I have written in some detail about the Tolkien-Lewis rift on my blog today.
Many thanks to you for providing the crucial stimulus to bring together these ideas (for what they are worth…)
I thought the movie about C.S. Lewis was a complete failure.
Except for that one scene, which is one of the most extraordinary on film: the camera stays on Anthony Hopkins’ face as he agonizingly realizes his reluctance to submit to the vulnerability of loving.
I didn’t like the Hopkins movie much at all. I do, on the other hand, recommend the original version of the production, a BBC TV movie now marketed as “C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands,” starring Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom. Far closer to the real story (though many liberties are taken), and much more emphasis on the faith issues. Though Claire Bloom was entirely wrong for the part of Joy.
My wife and I went to London on our honeymoon 10 years ago and took a day trip to Oxford. I was looking and looking for this pub, but finally had to get back on the tour bus. As the bus was pulling out, I saw the “Bird and Baby” out of the back window — I had been standing across the street from it all the time, only it had been obscured by a beer truck.
The Magic Beer Truck. It’s not generally known that in the first draft of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it was through a beer truck that Narnia was accessed.
I had heard it was through eating ‘schrooms. What a nasty liberal lie that was, and to think of the foul ‘shrooms I tasted hoping to go to Narnia.