http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
March 12, 2011
It seems hard to remember now that there was a time when the American counterculture embraced J.R.R. Tolkien and his masterpiece. Groovy dudes in pipe-weed jerkins yelling “Go Go Gandalf,” walls covered with graffiti proclaiming “Frodo Lives!”, and election-year “Gandalf for President” buttons were all popular sights on college campuses from Harvard to Berkeley.
The author himself was properly repulsed by the hippie movement (and indeed, by what he saw as the entire slovenly depths of American culture in general), and late in life began referring to their nightmare world of antiwar riots and hedonism as “this Fallen Kingdom of Arda, where the servants of Morgoth are worshipped.” But it was not only our side of the pond that gave him grief: he watched aghast as his work became so superficially popular and grossly misunderstood among the hip and the mod in Great Britain that the Beatles expressed a desire to star in a film version of The Lord of the Rings, complete with Stanley Kubrick directing!It was Gandalf himself who warned Saruman that, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” But that little nugget of common sense, and virtually everything else that made the book special, was passed over by those who were trying to snort, smoke, and screw their way out from under the thumb of The Man and Western Civ. Tolkien considered the free-love drug mob and its associated subgroups “cults of faineance and filth” that mindlessly smashed everything Old and Noble and Sacred while simultaneously embracing everything New, Hip, and Easygoing, all in a foolish, futile attempt to deconstruct and experiment their way to an earthly Utopia. Unlike so many from that crazed era, the man who decades earlier had laboriously penned Frodo’s arduous journey to Mount Doom knew better than to grant hippie pipe-dreams intellectual or spiritual credence.
“The essence of a fallen world,” he once wrote, “is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.” Catholics will well-recognize this belief, and (in my experience) are laudably well-versed in the truth of its sentiments. “What a dreadful, fear-darkened, sorrow-laden world we live in,” Tolkien groaned in 1969, while the childish, cataclysmic madness was at its height. “. . . Chesterton once said that it is our duty to keep the Flag of This World flying: but it takes now a sturdier and more sublime patriotism than it did then. . . there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydra’s heads.”
The chattering class, as it always does, ham-handedly tried to make sense of it all. In Life magazine for February 24, 1967, Charles Elliot did a good job of embarrassing himself while capturing the elite condescension of that time:Surely [The Lord of the Rings] is not the stuff of which campus heroes are made, even though it does provide Tolkien aficionados with something to discuss over their pipe-weed, mushrooms and brown ale. What apparently gets the kids square in their post-adolescent sensibilities is not the scholarship top-dressing but the undemanding, comfortable, child-sized story underneath. No symbolism, no sex, no double meanings, no questions about which are the Good Guys and which the Bad, just a good yarn on the level of Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout.
The Lord of the Rings is thoroughly innocent. It is even innocent of ideas, which doubtless helps recommend it to those aggressive searchers for sincerity, the opt-out crowd. . . I am prepared to be generous so long as the whole thing doesn’t get out of hand.
Prepared to be generous. Gee, thank God for that! That’s the kind of pompous cultural gate-keeping that far too many professional critics engage in, and it always makes them look like fools in the long run. I note that, forty-five years later, Tolkien is as popular (and as critically studied) as ever, even while Charles Elliott is forgotten and the magazine he wrote for is defunct.
As the 1960s degenerated into the 1970s Tolkien’s popularity shot into the stratosphere, his book standing as a veritable beacon of light in the darkness of the Age. The counterculture, via Tolkien interviews and exposés featured in magazines and on TV, began to learn a bit more about the man behind the tripped-out novels that had them all abuzz. This was no cool, far-out elderly statesman like Timothy Leary or Pete Seeger, but a devout Catholic war veteran whose every public utterance seemed to shore up the old ways rather than mock them or tear them down. It wasn’t long before the pot-smoking, ’shroom-popping crowd abandoned Tolkien almost as quickly as they had embraced him.
The backlash was presaged as early as 1969, when two miscreant humorists (who soon after would found National Lampoon magazine) released Bored of the Rings, a popular parody penned in what would become the classic Lampoon style. Fun as it was for a few idle laughs, it also foreshadowed Tolkien’s future among the “we are the change we’ve been waiting for” halfwits. They were “Bored of the Rings” because the tale was now mainstreamed, and thus stripped of its counterculture cachet. Previously used by hippies as a literary lava lamp to inspire wild mental imagery suitable for dropping acid, making jejune political points at insane rallies, or freaking out one’s elders, it now possessed all of the utility of a used condom. Within a few years most ripped the Middle-earth posters off their walls, tossed out their Leonard Nimoy “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” records, and moved on to the next fleeting hot thing.*************************
At the hill’s foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they once had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord tall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vanimelda, namárië! he said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled.
“Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,” he said, “and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!” And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man.
*************************
“I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote again and again over the course of his long life. “. . . I am looking for something I can’t find.” Given the state of literature both before and after The Lord of the Rings, it’s not hard to imagine why. Purpose and Truth is such a rare thing to feel in art of any kind — books, film, painting, dance, song. It’s certainly utterly absent from the tales of modern authors who spend thousands of pages knocking our emotional and spiritual joints out of kilter in an effort to be hard-hitting, funny and edgy.
In so many stories from the “bored with the Good” crowd, readers are continually invited, even cleverly lured, into trusting their higher aspirations and nobler instincts, only to have those precious, delicate things cast back into their faces with a cackle. At base, it’s an attempt to deliberately scramble and pervert your inner compass — your moral and spiritual pole star — beyond all recognition, rearranging the stained glass windows of your mind until all that’s left are meaningless, mad swaths of bright color. To some of us, this is no light matter to be laughed at or ignored.
The work of modern authors like Martin, Abercrombie, Stover, et al. would have surprised Tolkien not a bit — he clearly anticipated the various attempts of today’s fallen fantasists to (d)evolve past The Lord of the Rings by making their stories “self-aware,” “quasi-historical,” “morally complex,” and (most laughably of all) “real.” Such authors, he felt, cultivate and cherish “sneer and cynicism” because it allows them to preen with the false belief that they are “freer from hypocrisy” than past generations, “since it does not ‘do’ to profess holiness or utter high sentiments.” Scaling hills of garbage and then gazing down on humanity as if from artistic or moral high ground didn’t impress Tolkien. “Inverted hypocrisy,” he called it, and deemed it a belief as false as “the widely current inverted snobbery: men profess to be worse than they are.”
In a letter to his son Christopher dated May 6, 1944, Tolkien said that much of his early writing on Middle-earth was conducted “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle-light in bell tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.” He clearly was no stranger to the dank gutters of Life, and despite what lazy critics say his fiction adequately reflects this. Hobbits, Men, Dwarves, Elves, Wizards, and even Angelic Gods all are portrayed as fallible and fully capable of being tempted into great wickedness. “Some critics,” Tolkien sighed, “seem determined to represent me as a simple-minded adolescent, inspired with, say, a ‘With-the-flag-to-Pretoria’ spirit, and willfully distort what is said in my tale. I have not that spirit, and it does not appear in the story.”Yet if, as Tolkien famously stated, “a safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds,” then equally untrue are fairylands devoid of sincere expressions and manifestations of “holiness” and “high sentiments.” Something that (even at this late date) is little known to average Tolkien fans is that soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings he made overtures towards writing a sequel of sorts. The extant pages bear the title “The New Shadow,” and take place “about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor],” long after the death of King Aragorn.
Any hopes for a repeat of achieving a sanity and sanctity comparable to his earlier works were soon dashed by a sobering reality. “It proved both sinister and depressing,” he admitted, explaining that
Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: the quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a “thriller” about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would be just that. Not worth doing.
Upon reading this, I’m sure our fallen fantasists would offer up a whoop of approval, and lament that the old white-bread professor hadn’t gone through with this tentative exploration of his fictional universe’s treacherous underbelly, exposing all of the heroism and holiness of his earlier books as a hypocritical sham. They might even feel a certain justification about their own work, seeing in it a continuation of where Tolkien’s nascent ideas about “The New Shadow” left off, bravely (and perhaps with a smirk, nod and wink) descending into sewers where even the Master feared to tread.As for myself, I believe that Tolkien stopped work on “The New Shadow” because he knew that a fairyland attuned solely to the “sinister and depressing” would ring false, and that the things he cherished in works of high romance would feel too distant, too pale, in this new Age of Men. He knew in his heart that a fairyland bereft of heroism, nobility, and grace was just as “untrue to all worlds” as the reverse. And yet — like many artists past their prime — he was now too old and weary to seek out the rays of eucatastrophic sunlight which, in tales of Truth and Purpose, always manage to shine through the mass of dark billowing clouds threatening to engulf the world in everlasting gloom.
No, it took another brilliant writer to look deep into that grim, savage epoch of decadence and encroaching evil, and set against it noble men who leapt into battle with “the chants of old heroes singing in their ears.” In so doing, he thunderously proved that — in a true artist’s hands — hard-boiled is very different from nihilistic and morally reprehensible. The writer’s name is Robert E. Howard (pictured below), and by virtue of his haunting artistry, poetic splendor, and heroic sweep, he serves as Tolkien’s indispensable literary shield-brother in the fight against the vacuous capitulation to wickedness that infests so much of modern fantasy.
To be continued (in two weeks, after a much-needed vacation). . . . .
Author Archive (Find the first three parts of this series here):
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/author/lgrin/
No comments:
Post a Comment