Kitabı oku: «The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien», sayfa 6

My own history is so exceptional, so wrong and imprudent in nearly every point that it makes it difficult to counsel prudence. Yet hard cases make bad law; and exceptional cases are not always good guides for others. For what it is worth here is some autobiography – mainly on this occasion directed towards the points of age, and finance.

I fell in love with your mother at the approximate age of 18. Quite genuinely, as has been shown – though of course defects of character and temperament have caused me often to fall below the ideal with which I started. Your mother was older than I, and not a Catholic. Altogether unfortunate, as viewed by a guardian.¹ And it was in a sense very unfortunate; and in a way very bad for me. These things are absorbing and nervously exhausting. I was a clever boy in the throes of work for (a very necessary) Oxford scholarship. The combined tensions nearly produced a bad breakdown. I muffed my exams and though (as years afterwards my H[ead] M[aster] told me) I ought to have got a good scholarship, I only landed by the skin of my teeth an exhibition of £60 at Exeter: just enough with a school leaving schol[arship] of the same amount to come up on (assisted by my dear old guardian). Of course there was a credit side, not so easily seen by the guardian. I was clever, but not industrious or single-minded; a large part of my failure was due simply to not working (at least not at classics) not because I was in love, but because I was studying something else: Gothic and what not.² Having the romantic upbringing I made a boy-and-girl affair serious, and made it the source of effort. Naturally rather a physical coward, I passed from a despised rabbit on a house second-team to school colours in two seasons. All that sort of thing. However, trouble arose: and I had to choose between disobeying and grieving (or deceiving) a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most real fathers, but without any obligation, and ‘dropping’ the love-affair until I was 21. I don’t regret my decision, though it was very hard on my lover. But that was not my fault. She was perfectly free and under no vow to me, and I should have had no just complaint (except according to the unreal romantic code) if she had got married to someone else. For very nearly three years I did not see or write to my lover. It was extremely hard, painful and bitter, especially at first. The effects were not wholly good: I fell back into folly and slackness and misspent a good deal of my first year at College. But I don’t think anything else would have justified marriage on the basis of a boy’s affair; and probably nothing else would have hardened the will enough to give such an affair (however genuine a case of true love) permanence. On the night of my 21st birthday I wrote again to your mother – Jan. 3, 1913. On Jan. 8th I went back to her, and became engaged, and informed an astonished family. I picked up my socks and did a spot of work (too late to save Hon. Mods.³ from disaster) – and then war broke out the next year, while I still had a year to go at college. In those days chaps joined up, or were scomed publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in, especially for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage. No degree: no money: fiancée. I endured the obloquy, and hints becoming outspoken from relatives, stayed up, and produced a First in Finals in 1915. Bolted into the army: July 1915. I found the situation intolerable and married on March 22, 1916. May found me crossing the Channel (I still have the verse I wrote on the occasion!)⁴ for the carnage of the Somme.

Think of your mother! Yet I do not now for a moment feel that she was doing more than she should have been asked to do – not that that detracts from the credit of it. I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds p. a. (£20 – 40),⁵ and no prospects, a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern). She married me in 1916 and John was born in 1917 (conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-Boat campaign) round about the battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now. I sold out, and spent to pay the nursing-home, the last of my few South African shares, ‘my patrimony’.

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

44 From a letter to Michael Tolkien

18 March 1941

[Tolkien’s maternal ancestors, the Suffields, came from the West Midlands, and were particularly associated with Worcestershire.]

Though a Tolkien by name, I am a Suffield by tastes, talents, and upbringing, and any corner of that county [Worcestershire] (however fair or squalid) is in an indefinable way ‘home’ to me, as no other part of the world is. Your grandmother, to whom you owe so much – for she was a gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering, who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith¹ – died in the postman’s cottage at Rednal,² and is buried at Bromsgrove.

45 To Michael Tolkien

[Michael was now an Officer Cadet at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.]

9 June 1941

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

My dearest Michael,

I was so glad to hear from you. I would have written earlier to-day, only Mummy carried your letter off to Birmingham, before I had time to do more than glance at it. I am afraid that I show up badly as a letter writer: but really I get sick of the pen. Lectures ended on Thursday, and I hoped to get a little while (a) to rest, and (b) to put some order into the garden before ‘Schools’¹ begin on Thursday (Corpus Christi). But the everlasting rain has prevented my outdoor work, and lots of extra business prevented any rest. I sympathize with Govt. officials! I have spent most of my time of late drafting rules and regulations,² only to find all kinds of loopholes as soon as they are in print, and only to be cursed and criticized by those who have not done the work, and won’t try to understand the aims and objects!. . . .

One War is enough for any man. I hope you will be spared a second. Either the bitterness of youth or that of middle-age is enough for a life-time: both is too much. I suffered once what you are going through, if rather differently: because I was very inefficient and unmilitary (and we are alike only in sharing a deep sympathy and feeling for the ‘tommy’, especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties). I did not then believe that the ‘old folk’ suffered much. Now I know. I tell you I feel like a lame canary in a cage. To carry on the old pre-war job – it is just poison. If only I could do something active! But there it is: I am ‘permanently reserved’, and as such I have my hands too full even to be a Home Guard. And I cannot even get out o’nights to have a crack with a crony.

Still you are my flesh and blood, and carry on the name. It is something to be the father of a good young soldier. Can’t you see why I care so much about you, and why all that you do concerns me so closely? Still, let us both take heart of hope and faith. The link between father and son is not only of the perishable flesh: it must have something of aeternitas about it. There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet . . .

Did you see Maxwell (the ‘tobacco-controller’s’)³ account of what the wholesale dealers were doing! They ought to be in quod. . . . . Commercialism is a swine at heart. But I suppose the major English vice is sloth. And it is to sloth, as much or as more than to natural virtue, that we owe our escape from the overt violences of other countries. In the fierce modern world, indeed, sloth does begin almost to look like a virtue. But it is rather terrifying to see so much of it about, when we are grappling with the Furor Teutonicus.

People in this land seem not even yet to realize that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. Whose brave men are just about as brave as ours. Whose industry is about 10 times greater. And who are – under the curse of God – now led by a man inspired by a mad, whirlwind, devil: a typhoon, a passion: that makes the poor old Kaiser look like an old woman knitting.

I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the ‘Germanic’ ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the ‘Classics’. You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil. But no one ever calls on me to ‘broadcast’, or do a postscript! Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this ‘Nordic’ nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized. . . . .

Pray for me. I need it, sorely. I love you.

Your own Father.

46 From a draft to R. W. Chapman

26 November 1941

[George S. Gordon, who died early in 1942, was Tolkien’s head of department at Leeds University in the early 1920s, before becoming Professor of English Literature at Oxford and then President of Magdalen College. This draft appears to have been written in reply to a request from Chapman, the Secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, for reminiscences of Gordon, perhaps to be incorporated into an obituary; Gordon was already known to be terminally ill at the time the letter was written.]

I do not remember dates. Perhaps you know these? I put down some impressions, from which your skill may select a few notes or phrases that may seem appropriate. I associate Leeds with Gordon, although as a matter of fact of my six years there (1920–1925 and one year as a pluralist)¹ the larger part was spent in the company of Abercrombie.²

I remember that (before the last war) Gordon’s departure from Oxford³ was viewed with some consternation among the undergraduates of the English School in Oxford; but as a stiff-necked young philologist I did not myself regard the event as important. I first met Gordon at the interview in Leeds (June 1920) for the ‘Readership’ in English Language: established after the death by drowning of Moorman.⁴ I suppose the title (novel in Leeds), and the high salary (as such things go)⁵ were both due to Gordon and his farsighted policy. I was, I believe, only a substitute for Sisam⁶ (not the least of whose kindnesses was his pointing out the chance to me). But Gordon’s kindness and encouragement began at our first meeting. He rescued me from the barren waiting-room, and took me to his house. I remember we spoke of Raleigh⁷ on the tram. As (still) a stiff-necked young philologist, I did not in fact think much of Raleigh – he was not, of course, a good lecturer; but some kind spirit prompted me to say that he was ‘Olympian’. It went well; though I only really meant that he reposed gracefully on a lofty pinnacle above my criticism.

I was extraordinarily fortunate. And if I speak so of myself, instead of directly and impersonally of Gordon, it is because my prime feeling and first thoughts of him are always of personal gratitude, of a friend rather than of an academic figure. It is not often in ‘universities’ that a Professor bothers with the domestic difficulties of a new junior in his twenties; but G. did. He found me rooms himself, and let me share his private room at the University. I do not think that my experience was peculiar. He was the very master of men. Anyone who worked under him could see (or at least suspect) that he neglected some sides of his own work: finding, especially, the sort of half-baked ‘research’, and dreary thesis-writing by the serious minded but semi-educated hunters of the M.A., of which there was far too much, an exceeding weariness, from which he sometimes took refuge in flight. Yet he created not a miserable little ‘department’, but a team. A team fired not only with a departmental esprit de corps, determined to put ‘English’ at the head of the Arts departments, but inspired also with a missionary zeal. . . . .

A personal contribution of his was his doctrine of lightheartedness: dangerous, perhaps, in Oxford, necessary in Yorkshire. No Yorkshireman, or woman, was ever in danger of regarding his class in finals as a matter of indifference (even if it did not have a lifelong effect on his salary as a school teacher): the poet might ‘sit in the third and laugh’, but the Yorkshire student would not. But he could be, and was, encouraged to play a little, to look outside the ‘syllabus’, to regard his studies as something larger and more amusing than a subject for an examination. This note Gordon struck and insisted on, and even expressed in print in the little brochure which he had made for the use of his students. There was very little false solemnity, except rarely and that among the students.

As for my side: the foundations were already securely laid for me, and the lines of development marked out. But, subject always to his unobtrusive control, I had a ‘free hand’. Every encouragement was given to development on the mediæval and linguistic side; and a friendly rivalry grew up between two, nearly equal, divisions. Each had its own ‘seminars’; and there were sometimes combined meetings. Quite the happiest and most balanced ‘School’ I have seen. I think it might be called a ‘School’. Gordon found ‘English’ in Leeds a departmental subject (I rather fancy you could not get a degree in it alone) and left it a school of studies (in bud). When he arrived he shared a box of glazed bricks, mainly furnished with hot water pipes, with the Professor of French, as their private room. Mere assistants possibly had a hat-peg somewhere. When he left we had ‘English House’, where every member had a separate room (not to mention a bathroom!) and a common room for students: and with this centre the growing body of students became a cohesive unit, and derived some of the benefits (or distant reflections of them) that we associate with a university rather than a municipal college. It would not have been difficult to build on this foundation. But I fancy that, after he left, the thing just ‘ran on’, and did not fall into hands of the same quality. In any case numbers fell and finances changed. And Vice-Chancellors. Sir Michael Sadler I imagine was a helpful superior; and he left about the same time.

47 To Stanley Unwin

[Unwin wrote on 4 December to say that Foyle’s bookshop in London were to issue The Hobbit under the imprint of their Children’s Book Club, and that this had enabled Allen & Unwin to reprint the book. This was all the more desirable as the previous stock of copies had been burnt during an air-raid on London.]

7 December 1942

20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Mr Unwin,

Thank you for your note, containing two items of hope. I have for some time intended to write and enquire whether in the present situation it was of any use, other than private and family amusement, to endeavour to complete the sequel to The Hobbit. I have worked on it at intervals since 1938, all such intervals in fact as trebled official work, quadrupled domestic work, and ‘Civil Defence’¹ have left. It is now approaching completion. I hope to get a little free time this vacation, and might hope to finish it off early next year. My heart rather misgives me, all the same. I ought to warn you that it is very long, in places more alarming than ‘The Hobbit’, and in fact not really a ‘juvenile’ at all. It has reached Chapter XXXI² and will require at least six more to finish (these are already sketched); and the chapters are as a rule longer than the chapters of The Hobbit. Is such an ‘epic’ possible to consider in the present circumstances? Would you like to wait, until it is really finished; or would you care to see a considerable portion of it now? It is in type-script (of various amateur hands) up to about Ch. xxiii. I don’t think you will be disappointed with the quality of it. It has had the approval of the original Hobbit audience (my sons and Mr C. S. Lewis), who have read or heard it many times. But it is a question of paper, bulk, and market! It would require two maps.

The burning of The Hobbit was a blow. I am to blame in not writing (as I intended) and expressing to you my sympathy with the grievous damage you must have sustained, of which I shared only a very small part. Is any ‘compensation’ eventually recoverable?. . . .

Would you also consider a volume, containing three or four shorter ‘Fairy’ stories and some verses? ‘Farmer Giles’, which I once submitted to you, has pleased a large number of children and grown-ups. If too short, I could add to it one or two similar tales, and include some verse on similar topics, including ‘Tom Bombadil’. . . .

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

48 To C. S. Lewis

[Lewis kept very few letters, and only two that Tolkien actually sent to him have survived. (For the second, see no. 113.) ‘The U.Q.’ is an abbreviation for ‘Useless Quack’, the nickname given by his fellow Inklings to R. E. Havard, Tolkien and Lewis’s doctor. ‘Ridley’ was M. R. Ridley of Balliol College, who, with Tolkien and Lewis, was involved in teaching forces cadets at the university, on the wartime ‘short courses’. Lewis was, meanwhile, also travelling around England giving talks on the Christian religion to RAF stations.]

20 April 1943

[20 Northmoor Road, Oxford]

My dear Jack,

V: sorry to hear you are laid low – and with no U.Q. to suggest that it may be your last illness! You must be v: disconsolate. I begin to think that for us to meet on Wednesdays is a duty: there seem to be so many obstacles and fiendish devices to prevent it.

I hope to have a good report of you soon. But do not trouble yourself. Ridley was so astounded at the ignorance of all 22 cadets, revealed in his first class, that he has leaped at the chance of another hour, esp. since otherwise there was no ‘Use of E[nglish]’ class next week at all. You can (if you wish) shove in ‘Arthur’¹ on some other date, when you are recovered fully. The tutorials do not matter.

I fear you are attempting too much. For even if you have merely got ‘flu’, you are prob. tiring yourself into an easy victim. As a mere ‘director’, I shall hope v. much to persuade you to ease off in travel (if poss.), and put some weight into this cadet stuff. I am a bit alarmed by it. My lone machine-gun since it started seems to me to have missed the target, and it needs at least one more gun – to depend on – other than the valuable Ridley.

I lunched at the Air Squadron to-day & got a brief whiff of an atmosphere now all too familiar to you, I expect.

Yours affectionately

T²

PS. Ridley’s first question in the test-paper was a group of words to define – apposite, reverend, venal, choric, secular and a few others. Not one cadet got any of the words right.