Rereading _Tolkien: Author of the Century_ by Tom ****ppey.
Toward the end, discussing the rabid hatred of Tolkien's work
by the mass of literary critics, ****ppey says:
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However, I would give at least the next-to-last word on this
subject to Martin Green, a conspicuously fair-minded writer with
almost no interest in Tolkien (whose name in any editions of his
book he invariably misspells). The Inklings, he wrote -- Charles
Williams and Dorothy Sayers, Lewis and (sic) Tolkein -- avoided
the poses of the _Sonnenkinder_ and centred their thinking on
orthodox Christian theology, and on the problem of evil. Green
admits that 'Most aspects of their ideological and imaginative
behaviour' strike him as:
more generous, intelligent and dignified than those of
either Leavis [doyen of mid-century English critics] or
Waugh -- or Orwell, for that matter, if considered in
the abstract. But considered in the concrete, the ideas
of the last three have at various times meant everything
to me, while the others _meant_, in that sense, nothing.
I approve what they did, but theoretically; I read the
books it resulted in approvingly, but I am not really at
all engaged by them.
And one reason surely is that these writers removed
themselves from the cultural dialectic. Undignified as
that often was, both personally and intellectualy,
that was where the action was. . . .
(Green, 1977, pp. 495-6)
I understand and respect Green's position, though it is not mine.
His last remark however reminds me of a famous music-hall joke, a
kind of sub-literary _Waiting for Godot._ On a darkened stage,
a single light is burning. A man is down on his hands and knees,
crawling round in silence, obviously looking for something.
Eventually a second man comes on, and says, after watching for a
while, 'What are you doing?' 'I'm looking for a sixpence I
dropped,' replies the crawler. The second man gets down on his
hands and kneese and starts to help him. After a while the
second man says, 'Just where did you drop it, anyway?' 'Oh, over
there,' says the first one, getting to his feet and walking over
to the other side of the stage, in the dark. 'Then why are you
looking for it here?' cries the second man in exasperation. The
first one walks back to his original place and starts crawling
round again. 'Because,' he replies, 'that's where the light is.'
In this allegory of mine, the light = modernism, the crawling
searcher = Toynbee (or Greer, or Susan Jeffreys from the _Sunday
Times,_ any of the critical multitude). I am not at all sure
what the sixpence may =, but Tolkien was out there in the dark,
looking for it.
-----------------------end quote-----------------------------
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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