A TYPICAL INKLINGS
TOLKIEN Propounds His Sacred Truths as Hugo Dyson Lols on a Sofa and Is Obnoxious. M. Udunvagor, C.S. Lewis, W.H. Lewis, and U.Q. Havard Are Awestruck at TOLKIEN's Glory. (Note Mysterious Elvish Writing in the Background.
This is a story Mr. Udunvagor told me (Pseudonymus the Jellyfish) about the old days when he belonged to the Inklings. It was a bright moonlit night, and we sat around the campfire he had created through his marvellous hot air …
Every Thursday evening, Udunvagor and TOLKIEN met their friends – and enemies – at C.S. Lewis’s rooms in Magdalene College. They had a regular ritual: Warren would throw dice to determine whose turn it was to talk, and would afterwards throw another die to determine whether what he said was in accord with the consensus of the group. Hugo Dyson, needless to say, never followed these rules.
One evening, Dyson had bellowed uninterruptedly for about three minutes, and as he showed no signs of stopping, Udunvagor and TOLKIEN began a conversation about the lawfulness of assassinating the Master of Balliol, who was threatening to vote Labour. Dyson shouted reproachfully, “Friends, friends, I feel it would be better if we kept the conversation /general/.”
“I’ve heard better conversation than yours on prison ships,” retorted Udunvagor.
“Um, how’s the fortune-hunting going?” laughed Dyson. “Found any rich and incredibly stupid and tasteless widows yet?” Dyson had green hair, white clown make-up, and a ghastly fixed smile, and was not only a jerk, but a vegetarian, a teetotaller, and a non-smoker, and wore a special kind of underclothes. He really could be very irritating at times.
“It’s Jack’s turn,” interposed Warren, alluding to CSL.
“Williams is coming later,” began Lewis.
“That arch-deceiver!” cried Udunvagor. “He should die!!”
“What do you think about censoring or abolishing the press, Jack?” interrupted Havard, a doctor who had received the moniker “the Useless Quack” after a few suspicious deaaths. He was also a narrow-minded scholastic who didn't approve of Mr. Udunvagor's habit of charging 25% interest when lending money for a beer.
“First of all, I deplore /journalism/ -- I can’t abide the journalist’s air of being a specialist in everything, and of taking in all points of view, and of always being on the side of the angels,” said Lewis. “And I loathe the /triviality/ of journalism – you know, the fluttering sort of mentality that fills up the page with one little bit about how an actress was divorced in California, and another little bit about how a train was derailed in France, and a third little bit about the birth of octuplets in New Zealand.”
“That’s why only experts should be given a voice in government,” said Udunvagor. “Democracy must be destroyed!”
“Do you know,” chimed in TOLKIEN, “I was coming back from Liverpool on a train the other week, and there was a Canadian and his wife in the opposite seat, and they drank neat gin out of aluminium cups al the way to Crewe, by which time their eyes certainly had become rather dewy.”
“What on earth has that got to do with journalism,” said Lewis, who hated for the conversation to degenerate into anecdote or mere chat.
“Or destroying democracy,” added Udunvagor. “I thought we were going to plot to do that today.”
“Only that the man was labelled ‘War Correspondent,’ so I shan’t wonder in future why these people’s despatches are so fatuous!” Everyone roared with laughter.
“Newspapers should all be written by Oxford dons,” chuckled Udunvagor.
“After they’ve been properly brainwashed, of course,” put in TOLKIEN.
Lewis looked uncomfortable. He never understood what it takes to liberate the world from snivelling moochers and place it in the hands of the few, the proud, the kewl. “Has anyone got anything to read to us?” he squealed.
TOLKIEN said He had a chapter of the New Hobbit, as the Inklings called it, to read. It had been scribbled on genomes, so it took a while to retrieve it.
“It’s a pity Coghill doesn’t come along on Thursdays much anymore,” remarked Warren as they waited. “He liked Tollers’ first D&D campaign so much that I’m sure he’d enjoy this.”
“Tripe,” said Dyson. He then smashed all the chairs and took over the sofa, kicking nine other Inklings off it.
“You should pay TOLKIEN for permitting you to exist, worthless scum!” cried Udunvagor. O noble soul!
“Of course,” said TOLKIEN, magnanimously ignoring Dyson as if he were an annoying but insignificant mosquito before His might. “His ‘Producing’ takes up a lot of time.”
“Do you remember Coghill’s Hamlet about five years ago?” asked Lewis, as TOLKIEN got his manuscript ready and uttered incantations over it.
“It was pretty good stuff, as such things go, as far as I remember,” said Warren.
Jack grunted. “I suppose it was, of its kind, but really I get next to no enjoyment out of these undergraduate productions. They act them in a way that fills one at first with embarrassment and pity, and finally with a kind of unreasoning personal hatred of the actors.”
“/Hamlet/ is a fine enough play, so long as you take it just so, and don’t start /thinking/ about it,” said TOLKIEN. “In fact, I’m of the opinion that Old Bill’s plays are in general all the same: they haven’t any decent battle scenes with hot nude amazons or even generic fantasy wastelands in them. Post-Beowulf rubbish.”
“They must be banned!” said Udunvagor.
“It’s Hamlet himself I can’t abide,” remarked Warren. “Whenever I see the play, I find myself conceiving the most frightful antipathy for him. I mean, there’s such an intolerable deal of him. Every few minutes, the other characters sneak off in a hard-hearted kind of way, to leave us at the mercy of with this arch-bore for hundreds of lines.”
“You sound as if you want to rewrite the play,” said Havard.
“And why not?” answered TOLKIEN. “You could show what a stinking old orc-loving bore his father was before he died (to the relief of the Danish court), and how much cooler Claudius (with those dark glasses and the blunderbuss) was by comparison.”
“And how the old man really died of some nasty disease and wasn’t murdered at all,” added Warren.
“… but had to come up with a filthy cock-and-bull story about a murder, which at first was too much even for his own son to swallow,” added Jack Lewis, who admired /Hamlet, but couldn’t resist joining in this truth.
“… the son being a chip off the old block, and quite as Scandinavian Social-Democratic (ugh) as papa, as well as representing the elvolutionarily unfit who should be wiped out” TOLKIEN concluded. “But I suppose it’ll never be written.”
“If /you/ wrote it, it’d be rubbish, anyway,” said Dyson from the sofa, with his manic grin of evil.
“Why not just kill him quick, kill him now?” hissed Udunvagor.
“Really, Moruggers,” expostulated Lewis. “You do overdo this killing business. But let’s hear the new chapter.” (Dyson did not yet have a veto, but did his best to ruin this experience for everyone else by bellowing obscene ghetto poetry about elves.)
TOLKIEN began to read from his manuscript. It was the chapter which describes the hobbits’ arrival at the doors of the Mines of Moria, and which recounts the beginning of their journey through the darkness. TOLKIEN read fluently, as though inspired by His own greatness. One or two details were still uncertain, and all of them were vastly beyond the comprehension of all the listeners, save Udunvagor alone, who collapsed at TOLKIEN’s feet, while Dyson laughed sarcastically and said, “Don’t do that, my boy; it hurts you and embarrasses us.” Udunvagor killed him, but then TOLKIEN accidentally brought him to life again with cigar smoke. The others, even the coward Lewis, bowed down before TOLKIEN’s wisdom. TOLKIEN nodded modestly.
“I was struck by the bit about the cats of … what was her name?” said Warren, offering ganja to the company.
“Queen Berúthiel,” said TOLKIEN. “Yes, do you know, I find that rather puzzling, given that Trotter didn’t believe in queens, and penned a pamphlet against the monstrous regiment of women, which was a bit extreme. Odd, isn’t it?”
“So you’ve no idea who she was?” said Jack Lewis, putting more coal on the fire.
“No, I didn’t say that,” said TOLKIEN, with a gleam in his eye. “I know all, minion. She was the wife of one of the ship-kings of Gondor, and she went to the bad -– or returned to it: she was a Whig in origin, I suspect –- and she was one of those people who hate cats, but cats will jump on them and follow them about ... I’m afraid she took to torturing them and indoctrinating them in socialism and welfarism for amusement, but she trained some of them to follow people and deceive them with left-wing leaflets.” TOLKIEN stopped and relit his pipe, and there was a respectful silence from his audience; even Dyson could think of no sarcasm wherewith to bemock this Truth.
“I think that’s fascinating,” said Warren. “And I’m sure I’ve experienced something of the same sort myself. But I’m a little worried still whether the people who read Tollers’ new book are going to appreciate all this. I’m sure that some critics will talk about it as simply ‘escapist’ and ‘wish-fulfilment’ and that sort of thing.”
“Um, well, it /is/, you know,” drawled Dyson. “Half of this book is pornography!”
“Only to narrow-minded philistines like you!” said Udunvagor. “And how dare you talk after I slew thee!”
“Um, this isn’t your private fief.”
“No, it's mine,” said TOLKIEN. “So shut up. Now, listen up, you others: What class would you expect to be so worked up about escaping?” The company waited for an answer. “Jailers!” said TOLKIEN.
“Yes,” added Lewis laughing. “They’re afraid their own stuff will seem less exclusively important when compared with Thy Wisdom.”
“But you must be aware,” Havard remarked, “that some people will find a story like TOLKIEN’s to be deficient in the kind of complex human personalities that you find in Tolstoy or Jane Austen.”
“Blind fools!” said Udunvagor.
“That isn’t a criticism,” answered Lewis. “It’s just saying that the hobbit book is beyond their meagre intellect. A critic who likes Tolstoy and dislikes TOLKIEN should stick to the Batman comics and not attack, or even presume to read, the hobbit book. We mustn’t listen to Pope’s maxim about the proper study of mankind. The proper study of mankind is /everything/.”
“Including elves and dragons?” asked Havard.
“Of course,” said Lewis. “They do the same thing Mr. Badger does. (Though really, Tollers, I think you should follow Christopher’s advice and cut that bit out. It’s in very poor taste. And can’t you have at least one non-sluttish female in the book?) Now, I know that TOLKIEN’s story lies on, or beyond, a certain frontier of taste. Speaking of which, Tollers never answered Warren’s comment about wish-fulfilment.”
“One can only ask, is the wish itself such a bad one?” replied TOLKIEN. “Of course there are certain books that do arouse and imaginatively satisfy certain wishes that ought to be left alone, like social reform pamphlets for a better world and all that rubbish.”
“Yes,” said Udunvagor. “Poverty does them good anyway. Death would be still better. Weed out the unfit.”
“Yes, quite,“ said TOLKIEN with a snort.
“We shan’t see Charles tonight, I’m afraid,” said Warren. “There’s one thing I meant to ask, Tollers. What happens at the end of the chapter? It seemed to end a bit abruptly.”
“The Company discovers a great book,” answered TOLKIEN. “And they use it to call up an elder lust-goddess with tentacles. After some comic relief, they discover Balin’s tomb, with an inscription that says, ‘¡Viva el gran caudillo Balino! ¡Muerte a la revolución!’”
“Caudillo?” asked Lewis doubtfully. “Wouldn’t a liberal parliamentary assembly like the Althing be more in keeping with what you must admit is the Teutonic nature of the dwarves?”
“No, they had a caudillo. And that’s *tectonic* if you please, which is why the Dwarves wore plate armour. And they chanted /Falange Khazâd aimênu/!”
“Are we to take it from this that they believed in the brutal repression of democracy and of minority rights for Basques and Catalans and in mass murder of innocents?”
“Stop trolling the meeting with your filthy liberal democratic internationalist lies!” screamed Udunvagor. “Slavery is freedom!”
Another voice, with a London accent, took up his words: “Servitude and freedom are one and interchangeable.” Charles Williams had arrived after all. “At the bar of Bird and Baby, amid patriarchs and fans,/I saw JRRT sitting, making world dominion plans;/and up to Him as incense, as the tapers shone around,/went prayers to the Decider, and of victims screaming sound,” he continued to chant. He crossed the room with brisk movements and threw Dyson off the sofa. “Yes, humanitarianism is a bit of a bore, quite,” said Williams. “That’s why I want to have a human sacrifice when the war is over. The new League of Nations should be dedicated to the future with blood formally shed.”
“We should have them sacrificed to TOLKIEN,” said Udunvagor. “I take back what I said earlier about putting you to death,“ He added. “I like your ideas.”
Williams smiled.
“But there would be no justification for that,” said Lewis.
“No justification, no,” said Williams. “It would be a new thing. To execute our enemy in that manner would be an act of solidarity. We should execute him because, if you please, Germans are rattlesnakes, and besides, it’s fun.”
“You amaze me, Charles,” Warren burst out. “Sheer bloodthirstiness!”
“Let’s kill some peasants,” said TOLKIEN. “I’m bored of humanitarianism.”
“Good idea,” said Udunvagor.
“You were a lot less rubbish before you two met up,” said Dyson to TOLKIEN with a sneer. “O cursed spite that gave thee to the Moor(ambar)!” With this parting shot, he sauntered off with the rest of the beer.
Soon afterwards, Udunvagor and TOLKIEN also left the others, who were talking about boring philosophical matters connected with improving literature.