J R R Tolkien

Oscar Yuill reflects on why so many American Catholics are drawn to Tolkien, Chesterton, tweed waistcoats and the world of the English Catholic literary revival, despite its collapse in the country that produced it A friend recently invited my wife and me to North Carolina for a seminary-run BBQ, chock full of vibrant Catholic families and with the promise of succulent meats, home-grown tobacco and chortling allusions to that magnificent beast, the Chesterbelloc. Indeed, I have seldom met an American Catholic, at least of a certain age, who is not immersed in the works of the 20th-century British Catholic literary revival. Photographs from my friend’s wedding, in the same Carolinian town, show toddlers dressed, it seems, for Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday. The groomsmen hold churchwarden pipes. And the best man resembles Chesterton to a degree scarcely believable. We had not so much been invited to North Carolina as to 1930s Oxford. Why should this be so? Why is the dominant traditionalist subculture in America so keen to ape the language, liturgical preferences and sartorial eccentricities of a revival that was, arguably, a complete failure? Only in 1852, at the first Provincial Synod of Westminster, had Newman declared: “Canterbury has gone its way. The Church in England has died, and the Church lives again. Westminster and Nottingham, Beverley and Hexham, Northampton and Shrewsbury, if the world lasts, shall become names as musical to the ear, as stirring to the heart, as the glories we have lost.” It seemed for a brief period that Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Muriel Spark, David Jones, Eric Gill, Christopher Dawson, Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn and countless others were the fulfilment of Newman’s optimism, inaugurating a new epoch of triumphal cultural Catholicism. (Such, indeed, was the fear among their cultural and moral competitors, such as the Bloomsbury Group.) “Arise,” Newman went on to say, quoting Solomon; “make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come. For the winter is now past, and the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land.” Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton in 1927 Yet the flowers in this “Second Spring” were to be the lilacs and “dried tubers” of Eliot’s wasteland. Many of the buds were mown down in Flanders and Ypres and Passchendaele before they could bloom. No sooner had the Catholic Church been replanted in England than all Christendom leapt to the same assisted suicide. Surviving Catholics were forced to contend, in their poems and paintings and novels, with a disintegration of truth and meaning more total than Newman could have predicted, though certainly he detected its stirrings in the spectre of theological liberalism. Even at the level of technique – Evelyn Waugh was one of the first novelists to use the stilted language of “telephonese” – the works of the post-war generation often seemed forced into mirroring the fragmentation of a morally traumatised continent. When the 1960s rolled in, the vandalism extended even to the liturgies that had given them all their only anchor in the maelstrom. (Waugh et al.’s consternation with the Mass of Paul VI is well documented.) Vocations and church attendance cratered, only now showing signs of arrest. To the likes of Wilde, a Catholic conversion was a great, romantic thing, “the only religion to die in”. To Orwell, merely half a century later, commenting on Marchmain’s deathbed conversion in Waugh’s Brideshead: “One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up.” In which case, why grow up at all? Enter, then, the American mind. The average American, particularly in their jamboree-style politics, exudes an earnestness and sincerity that we in England often find perplexing. I am far from the first to make this observation, and I wonder if it has something to do with their lack of a deep “blood memory”: centuries of political and religious strife, culminating in the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, have created in Europe a collection of more or less jaded peoples. For example, patriotism in England or France or Germany may be derided, it may be ironic, it may be defensive. But the one thing it never is, and what in America it routinely is, is perfectly natural. Innocent. Dare I say child-like. I have a son of my own on the way and am looking forward to seeing the world afresh through his eyes. I know that, in four or five years, I have only to hand him a rotten stick covered in lichen and it shall become Excalibur. Children, of course, love belonging to clubs and gangs and posses. There is nothing that a child likes so much as to have a secret society and to make no secret of it. The same could be said of Americans and, in fact, that last sentence was a quote from Chesterton about Americans; I had only to substitute the word “child”. I should be clear. None of this is a comment on the intelligence of Americans. Chesterton himself thought them rather better educated than the average Englishman. I am suggesting, rather, that, for my Carolinian friend, enthusiasm for Tolkien & Co. – and dip pens and bitter ale and tweed waistcoats and churchwarden pipes – are effectively ways in which American Catholicism, much like the American Constitution, puts old wine into new wineskins. Much as the Celtic monks of Skellig Michael, at the outermost reaches of the world, were eventually to look back Romeward for their ecclesiological integrity, it was perhaps inevitable that American Catholics fell in love with a “style” of Catholicism rooted in the soil of the mother country. Wouldn’t you long for the Shire in a nation whose defining image, according to a recent meme, is the liminal space of the glowing Shell petrol station? In the end, my wife and I were compelled to stay put. We couldn’t afford the trip. She’s also 25 weeks pregnant. Add to that an elderly greyhound, for whom finding a dog-sitter is a nightmare. As good, jaded English folk, we know, of course, that Belloc’s cherished Sussex inns are shuttered, Tolkien’s beloved Midlands scoured and Chesterton’s fence torn up with insufficient reason. Tweed is reserved for the Mogg dynasty; pipes, for rosaceous pensioners quaffing their fifth Doom Bar of the morning on a Wetherspoons patio. The Catholic literary revival failed in England: England rejected it, ceding to paganism on the one hand and Islam on the other. Americans don’t have that legacy; to them, it was never a failure. Far away, in the touching sincerity of the American imagination, it all still exists, and can exist anywhere. Christ plays in ten thousand places, including in Gastonia, NC.