Tolkien and the Great War. John Garth
TCBS; none of them seem to have any mortal thing about which they can get angry; they merely make light and clever remarks (GBS is a perfect genius at it, I admit) about nothing at all.’ According to Wiseman, Barnsley and Barrowclough had demolished his own self-confidence, and Gilson’s. Now, before it was too late, he appealed to his oldest friend ‘by all the memories of VT [Vincent Trought], of Gothic, of binges in Highfield Road, of quarrels about philology’ to come to a crisis meeting after term with Gilson, Smith, and himself.
Such was his disenchantment that he scarcely expected a reply. Instead, he found that for once he and Tolkien were in total agreement. ‘I tell you, when I had finished your letter I felt I could hug you,’ Wiseman wrote back. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge had ‘destroyed what made you and me the Twin Brethren in the good old school days before there was a TCBS apart from us and VT’, he said.
Tolkien defended G. B. Smith, saying his superficiality was just a mask adopted in response to the ‘alien spirit’ now dominating their conclaves; but he agreed that Gilson had gradually lost interest in matters of moral weight and was now simply an aesthete. Tolkien thought Smith fell broadly into the same category, but he suspected that both men were still simply a trifle callow, rather than intrinsically shallow. Certainly he had no thought of excluding them. About one thing Tolkien was adamant: ‘the TCBS is four and four only’; the ‘hangers-on’ must be ejected.
Despite his strictures, Tolkien maintained that the society was ‘a great idea which has never become quite articulate’. Its two poles, the moral and the aesthetic, could be complementary if kept in balance, yet its members did not actually know each other well enough. While the Great Twin Brethren had discussed the fundamentals of existence, neither of them had done so with Gilson or Smith. As a result, Tolkien declared, the potential these four ‘amazing’ individuals contained in combination remained unbroached. So it was that the moral wing of the TCBS determined that the four should meet in Wandsworth two weeks before Christmas. ‘TCBS über alles,’ Wiseman signed off, wryly, at the end of a frantic few days’ correspondence.
It was touch-and-go whether G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson would be able to get to the ‘Council of London’, as the crisis summit was dubbed. Wiseman, like Tolkien, had early on decided to complete his degree before enlisting, on the basis that Kaiser Wilhelm had declared his soldiers would be back home by the time the leaves had fallen from the trees. Smith and Gilson, however, both now joined Kitchener’s army.
Gilson had found Cambridge as sad and dark in wartime as Tolkien found Oxford, and since the start of term had been pondering cutting short his final year. His father, the Headmaster of King Edward’s, had advised him to get his degree before enlisting, and told him (with some sophistry but more foresight) that he had no right to desert Cambridge now, when the university corps needed every man it could get in order to ensure a future supply of officers as the war went on. The turning point seems to have come for Gilson in early November, when a shy and difficult undergraduate whom he had just befriended, F. L. Lucas, reluctantly joined up. ‘He is not at all the sort of person who rushes into it without thinking what it means,’ wrote Gilson. ‘He is really rather a hero…’* Military lectures had impressed upon the sensitive Gilson ‘what a fearful responsibility it is to be entrusted with so many men’s lives’. On the other hand, he felt guilty for not volunteering, and was surprised to find himself enjoying even the most gruelling field exercises. Others of the broader TCBS had now joined up. Sidney Barrowclough had been accepted in the Royal Field Artillery, and Ralph Payton had become a private in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, T. K. Barnsley’s unit; though W. H. Payton had found an honourable alternative to combat by signing up for the Indian Civil Service in August. Desperate to put an end to months of doubt and guilt, Gilson waited until his twenty-first birthday was past, and on 28 November he joined the Cambridgeshire Battalion as a second lieutenant.
It was a relief, for although Gilson was strictly too sensitive for military life, he was sociable and found it easy to get on with his fellow officers. G. B. Smith, however, who was also sensitive but considerably less tolerant and naturally undisciplined, felt ‘much more a fish out of water’ after he followed suit on 1 December. Cary Gilson provided a character reference, and Oxford’s home regiment, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, took the young poet on. It meant Smith would be training in Oxford and billeted at Magdalen College, where he would be on hand to see Tolkien’s burgeoning efforts at writing. One of Smith’s own poems, ‘Ave Atque Vale’ (‘hail and farewell’), had just appeared in the Oxford Magazine: a paean to his university town (but also to life itself) announcing ‘we may not linger here. A little while, and we are gone…’
In the event, the two new subalterns both managed to arrange leave so that they could come to London on Saturday, 12 December. Gilson had moved the day before into officers’ huts at his battalion’s newly built camp at Cherry Hinton, just outside Cambridge. Under the auspices of Wiseman, in normal circumstances the visit would have been hilarious and carefree, with impromptu outings, missed trains, and countless telephone calls as he tried to keep his mother informed of his schedule. What with the family talent for chaos, and his father’s unpredictable hours, formality had given up the ghost at 33 Routh Road, Wandsworth. But now the four friends had urgent matters to discuss. They closeted themselves in Wiseman’s upstairs room and talked late into the night.
They dubbed the reunion ‘the Council of London’ as if it were a council of war; in fact it was a council of life. War did not intrude, despite the enlistment of Smith and Gilson: in Rob’s words, the four of them were ‘absolutely undistracted by the outside world’. They had made a timely decision, though, to combine and consider the matter in hand: the greatness of the TCBS. That the TCBS was somehow great was a long-standing conviction based on mutual admiration. Gilson now doubted the truth of it, but Wiseman thought that together they each seemed ‘four times the intellectual size’, as if each one absorbed the capabilities of all. Tolkien felt the same way about ‘the inspiration that even a few hours with the four always brought to all of us’; but the inanity that had overtaken the wider group in recent years had left Tolkien and Wiseman convinced that it must now plant its feet firmly in the bedrock of fundamental principles: in other words, all four must open up about their deepest convictions, as the Great Twin Brethren had done long ago. Tolkien put religion, human love, patriotic duty, and nationalism on the agenda. It was not necessary that they all agree, but it was important that they discover the ‘allowable distance apart’, as he put it: in other words, how much internal dissent the club could accommodate.
The Council surpassed all their hopes. ‘I never spent happier hours,’ Rob wrote to John Ronald afterwards. For Tolkien, the weekend was a revelation, and he came to regard it as a turning point in his creative life. It was, he said eighteen months later, the moment when he first became conscious of ‘the hope and ambitions (inchoate and cloudy I know)’ that had driven him ever since, and were to drive him for the rest of his life.
Tolkien had long harboured creative ambitions, but they had found their outlet in his invented languages, at one extreme, or in drawings. Now all that changed. It may well be that, under the oppressive weight of war, he felt an answering pressure from within that could find no outlet in the old creative habits. He had experimented with prose in his Story of Kullervo. Now, however, he was going to take his cue from the Kalevala itself, from the verse into which Kullervo had fallen with increasing frequency, and from G. B. Smith. He would become a poet.
In fact he had started already, a week before the Council, by writing an ambitious poem in a percussive version of the long line he had used in ‘From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames’. In its earliest published form, ‘The Tides’ begins:
I sat on the ruined margin of the deep voiced echoing sea
Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency
On the land besieged for ever in an aeon of assaults
And torn in towers and pinnacles and caverned in great vaults:
And its arches shook with thunder and its feet were piled with shapes
Riven in old sea-warfare from those crags and sable capes
By ancient battailous