thns of tone and hne is notably heightened.”

This is the beghning. There are marvels ta come. Huxky posits the reality s f other-worldly events. He

viincing way, with scientific accuracy of statement.

I would not wish to divulge all his secret% except to say that the TXeaven- induced by drug may in some cases, and under certain condi- t iax noted, turn into “Hell.” So even in this Other W,orld there may still be duality. Yet his last para- graph, before eight appendices, of- fers resolution, as fdlows:

”There is a posthumous state of the kind described in Sir Oliver Lodge’s book Raymond; but there

S e f i t X dl& pE..liZtTitie§ iil Z i Coi l -

is also a heaven of blissful visionaq experience; there is al& a hell of the same kind of appalling visionary experience as is suffered here by schizophrenics and some of those %-ho take mescalin; and ther.e,is also an experience, beyond tiine, of union with the divine Ground.”

Throughout the book and in the appendices there are cogent ex- amples of man’s attempts to get be- yond usual reality to visionary ex- citement in various arts and’ rituals.

Wethe r the reader will rush out and buy some mescalin I do not knowe but he ,might well t u s h out and buy a transporting book. It is a book of vision, so to speak, para- doxically written in a most down- toearth manner.

Awful Orcs! ,

IN 1937, Dr. J. R. R. Tolkien, %R

Oxford don, published a children’s book called The Mobbit , which had an immense success. The hobbits are a not quite human race who inhabit an imaginary country called the S1”” 1 ;It: and who combine &‘ne charac- teristics of certain English animals . “they live in burruws like Tabbits and badgers-with the traits of Eng- lish country-dwellers, ranging from I

”

rustic to twkedy. (The name seems a telescoping of rabbit and Hobbs.) They have elves, trolls and dwaris a3 neighbors, and they are associated with a magician called ’ GandaIph and a slimy water-creature called Gollurn. Dr. Tolkien ~ became inter- ested i m his falrqr-tale country and has gone on from this little story to elaborate a long romance, which has appeared, under the general title, The L o r d of the Rz9~g-s~ in three vol- umes: T h e Fellowshzp of {the Ring, T h e Two Towers and T h e Return of the King.“ All volumes are ac- cdrnpanied wit11 maps, and Dr. ~ o l - klen, who i s a philologist, professor at Mkrtm ~ o ~ e g e of English Lan- guage and Literature, has equipped the last volume with a scholarly ap- paratus of appendices, explaining

*Xough‘eon Mdilin; $5 each.

. EDMUND WILSON’S Red, Blick, live: Studies’ in Four

the alph,abets and grammars ‘of the various tongues spoken by his char- acters, and giving full genealogies and tables of historical chronology.

Dr. Tdkien has announced that this series-the hypertrophic sequel 10 The k-obbi t - is i n t ended fo r adults rather than children, and i t has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certalinly grown-up in years. Mr. Richard Hughes, for example, has ’

written of it that nothing of the kind on such a scale has been attempted ,‘since The Faerie Queen, and that “for width of imagination it almost beggars parallel.” “It’s odd3 you know,” says Miss Naomi Mitchison, uone takes it as seriously as’ Malory.” And Mr. C. S. Lewis, aIso of Oxford, is able to top them all: “If Ariosto,*’ he ringingly writes, “rivalled i t in invention (in fact, he does not), he would still lack its heroic serious- ness.” Nor has America been behind. In the Saturday Review I of Litera- ture, a Mr. Louis J. Halle, ’author of a book on CzuzEizcetion and Foreign Polzcy, answers as follows a lady who --“lowering,” he says, “her pince-nez” “has inquired what he finds in Tol- kien: “ m a t , dear lady, does this invented world have to do with our own2 You ask for its meaning-as you ask for the meaning of the Odys- sey’. of Gmesis, of Faust-in a Cord?

meaning than this is to be found l”n any literature?”

But if one goes from these eulogies to the book itself, one is likely to ‘be ’ let down, astonished, baffled. The reviewer has just read the whole thing aIoud to his seven-year-old daughter, who has been through The Hob bz t countless times, begin- ning it again, the moment she has finished, and whose interest has been held by its more prolix successors. q n e is puzzled to know why the author should have supposed he was writing for adults. There are, to be sure, some details that are a little unpleasant for a children’s book, but except when he is being pedantic and also boring the ‘adult ‘reader, there is’ little in The Lord of the R m g s over the head of a,seven-year- old child. It is essentially a chil- dren’s book-a children’s book which has somehow got out of hand. since. instead of directing it at the “juve- nile” market, the author has in- dulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake; and it ought , to be said at this point, before em- phasizing its inadequacies as litera- ture, that Dr. Tolkien makes few ,

claims for his fairy romance. 1n’“a statement prepared for his publish- ers, he has explained that he began! it to amuse himself, as a philologi- ’ cal game: “The invention of,, lan-’. guages is the foundation. The!: ‘stories’ were made rather to provide’’ a world for the languages than the: reverse. I should have preferred to write in I’Elvish‘.’’ He has omitted,” he says, in the printed book, a good‘ deal of the philological part; “but there is a great deal of linguistic matter . . . included or mytholog- i d l y expressed in the book. It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in ‘En- guistic esthetic,’ as I sornetlmes say to people who ask me ‘what it is all about:’ . . . It is not ‘about’ anything but itself. Certainly it has n o alle- gorical intentions, general, partic- ular or topical, moral, reJigious or political.” An overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity-that is, &-en, what The Lord of T h e Rings really is. The pl’etentiousness is all 011 the part of Dr. Tolkien’s infatuated ad- mirers, and it is these pretensions that I would here assail.

The most distinguished of Tol- kien’s admirers and the most con-

"

equipped critic of verse, m one, a5 hey say, will dispute. I t is signifi- cant, then, that he comments on the

'1,badness of Tolkiei?'s verse-there is a grFat deal of poetry &I The Lord bf the Rzngs. Mr. Auden is 'appar- ently quite insensitive-through lack of interest in the other department- to the fact that Tolkien's prose is ju$t a5 bad. Prose and verse are the same level of professorial ,am= tedrishnps. What I, believe has mis-, led Mr. Auden is his own special preoccupation with the legendary theme sf the Quest. He has written a book about the literature of the Quest; he has experimented with the theme himself' in a remarkable se- quence of sonnets; and it is to be hoped that he will do something with i t on an even %arger scale., In the meantiq~e-as sometimes ,happens with works that fall ' in with one's interests-he 'no doubt' so ovekates, The Lord, sf the Rings because he reads into it something that iie means t? write himself. It is indeed the tale of a Quest, but, to the reviewer, an extremely unrewarding one. The hero has no serious temptations; is lured by no insidious enchantments, perplexed by [few problems: What we get is 'a simple confrontation-in

.mere or less the traditional 'terms of British melodrama--of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good, the remdte and alien' villain with the plucky little home-grown hero. There are streaks of i,magination: the an-

, cient 'tree-spirits, the Ents, with' their deep eyes, twiggy beards, rumbly voices; the,Elv&, whose nbbi1i;y ,and beauty is elusive and not quite hu- man. But evenl these are rather cluh- sily handled. There is never much

' developmeni in the episodes; you 'simply go om getting more, of the same thing. Dr. Tolkien has l i t t k

Sonnet in +?arch of a i Authbr Nude bodies like 'peeled logs sometimei, g w e off a sweetest odor, man and woman under the try in full excess matching the cushion of aromatie pine-drift fallen threaded with trailing woodbine a sonnet mlght be made of it

Might' be macle of it! odor of excess odor sf pine needles, odor of peele'd logs, odor of no odor 0th: than trading woodbme that has no odor, odor of a nude woman sometimes, odor of a man.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLPANS

sGIl at nahtive and rm instinct far Iiterary form. The characters ' h l k a story-book language that might have come out bf Howard Pyle, 'and as personalities they do noi impose themselves. At the e n d ,df Ithis long romance, I had still no conception of the wizard Gandalph, ,.who, i s a ,cardinal, figure, had never been able to visualize him at all. For' the most part such characterizations as Dr. Tolkien is able to contrive are per-' fectly stereotyped: Frodo the good t little. Englishman, Samwise, his sog- like servant, who talks lower-class and resp,ectful, and never deserts hi3 master. These characters who are no eharacters are involved in intermi- nable adventures the poverty of in- vention displayed in which is, it Seems to me, almost $athetic. On the country in which the Hobbits, the ,Elves, the Ents and the other, Good People live, the Forces of Evil, are closing in, and they have to band together to save it. The hero is the Hobbit called Frodo who has be- come possessed of a ring that Sauron, the King 'of the Enemy, wants (that learned reptilian suggestion-doesn't' ' i t give you a goosefleshy fqeling?). In spite of the author's disclaimer, the struggle for the ring does seem to have some larger significance. This ring, If one continues to carrr): ib#

, confers upon orie special powers, but it is felt to become lheavler and heavier; it exerts oh one a sinister influence that one, has 'to brace one- '

self to resist. The problem is, for Frodo to get rid of 'it ,before hi can succumb to this, iriflutnce.

NOW, ' this , situation does , mea* interest; it does seem to haye pos- sibilities. ,One looks forward t s a queer dilemma, a new kind of hair- breadth 'escape, in which Frodo, in , the Enemy's kingdom, will find him- self half-seduced irito taking over the enemy's point of view, so that the realm of shadbws, and horrors will come to seem to him, once he is in it, once lie is strong in the poymr of the ring, a plausible and pleasant place, and he will nanowb escape the danger of becoming a monster himself. But these bugaboos are not magnetic; they are IcebIe and rather bIank; one does not feel they have any, rea1 power. The Good Peo- ple simply say "Boo" to them. There are Black Riders, of whom leve~-ydh~e is terrified but who never seem any- thing but specters. There aye.dread-

,.

I

w A brilliantly rkasond )'and inspiring view of America's oppoktunities in a world of revolution. E "A sober, measured analysis and critique . . . conetruetive and impressive." 1

" T h e M e w Yorker H'"Extreme1y useful and ehd- lenging . . a valuable contri- but~Qn."-lA#€S RESTON. M. Yo

"Timed Book Review

By the author of AMBASSAbCMtRr REPORT , $+SO

fuI hovering birds-thinink of it, hor- rible birds of prey! There are ogreish disgusting Orcs, who, however, rarely get to the point of committing any overt acts. There is a giant female spider - a dr e a d f u 1 creepy - crawly spider!-who lives in a dark cave and eats people. What one misses in all these terrors is any trace of con- crete reality. The preternatural. to be effective, should be given some sort of solidity, a real presence, rec- ognizable features-like Gulliver, like Gogol, like Poe; not like those phan- tom horrors of Algernon Blackwood which prove so disappointing after ,

the travel-book substantiality sf the ‘ landscapes in whlch he evqkes them.

Tolkien‘s horrors resemble these in their lack of real contact with their vict~ms, who dispose of them as we do of the horrors in dreams by s lmply push ing them or puffmg them away. As for Sauron, the ruler of Mordor (doesn’t the very name have a shuddery sound?) who concen- trates in his person everything ,that is threatening the Shire. the build-up for him goes on through three vnl- umes. Me makes his first, ‘rather

I promising, appearance as a terrible fire-rimmed yellow eye seen in a water-mirror. But this is a5 far as we ever get. Once Sauron’s realm is in- vaded, we think we are going to meet him; but he stdl remains noth- ing but a .bul;fiing eye scrutinizing all that occurs from the window of a remote dark tower. T h i s might, of course,:’ be made effective; but actually i f is not; we never feel +- ron‘s p4iver. And the climax, to whlch +e have been working up through exactly nine hundred and ninety-nine large close-printed pages, when it comes, proves extremely fiat. The ring is at last got rid sf by being dropped. into a fiery crater, and the kingdom of Sauron “top- ples” in a brief and banal earth- quake that sets fire to everything and burns it up, and so releases the au- thor from the necessity of telling the reader what exactly was, so ter- r ~ b l e there. Frodo has come to the end of his Quest, but the reader has

and fatigues of his jqurney. An irn- potence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heai-tbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly.

Now, how is it that these long- 514

I remained untouched by the wounds

I )

w l d e d volumes of what looks to tRis reviewer like balderdash have elic- ited such tributes as those above? ‘The answer is, I believe, that certain people-especially, perhaps, in Bri- tain-have a 1iEelong appetite for juvenile trash.. They would not ac- cept adult trash, but, confronted wlth the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which de- lighted in Elsie Dimmore and Lit t le Lord Fauntleroy and which seems# to have made of Billy Bunter, in Eng- land, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubbk, the? squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and

Spenser--both of, whom have a eh,aqp and a distinction &at Tolkien has never touched.

As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme. He at least yrites €or grown-up people, and hc does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good Peo- PI! and,Goblins. He can cover more 4

ground in an episode th’aL lasts only I

three pages than Tolkien is able to .in one of this twenty-page chaptcrs, and he can create a more disquieting impresslon by a reference to some- tlnng that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demon- d

I , *

ology.

T h e Shield of Irony r’

By May Sarton IT IS not strange since, as we are constantly reminded, this is an age of criticism, that irony should be- come one of the canons in literary appraisal and that a work lacking in this quality seems to -us to lack “seriousness.” Tn contemporary crit- icism the word irony is often coupled with the word maturity and a young poet: or novelist so aberrant as to set no value on it, would appear to be a clumsy, beaver is^ cha rac t e r with no literary manners. But once an attitude or device becomes fash- ionable, it is surely time it was re- examined. It is m y intention to do so here, however tentatively. How interesting’it would be, for instance, to come upon a review in which a poet was taken to task for an insuf- ficiently deepened concept ion of irony, and not merely praised for knowing how to use the bright shield

in his own defense. How interesting i t would be to find a contemporary novelist defined, as F. R. Leavis has defined George Eliot, “She sees too much3 and has too much the- hu- mility of the supremely intell~gent whose i n t e I 1 i g en c e involves self- knowledge, to he nux” than inci- dentally ironical.”

Of course we are in a ,period of timid retreat from the avant-garde positions taken by our immediate forebears. The novel is lapsing into long-winded particularized realism; poetry consohdates itself by means of varied and distinguished mastery of inherited techniques. Neither con- viction nor passion are much- in the atmosphere, nor is the clumsiness, that sometimes accompanies them. In these last years we have come a long way from the enthusiasms and 1

indignations of the twenties. .We look back ora giants like Dreiser as too crude for our purposes, which are increasingly self-conscious, dis- criminating and wary. We would suspect a poet as “personal” in one sense as Elmor Wylie, or in another as Carl Sandburg of being exhibi- tionist. The wricei- in Arnenca today has no illusions that he is #the De-

MAY SARTON, poet aa.d nonelift, was a Guggenhezm Fellow poetry.

, I n 1952 she reretved the Lyrx Aam-d of the Poetry Soczety of Amertca and rn 1953 was honored by Bryn M q w r College wzth the Lucy Martin Don- nelly , Fellowship. Her most. recent book 2s Faithful Are t he Wounds.