J.I.M. Stewart

This is a collection of essays, old and new, by diverse hands, brought together by James T. Como, a Professor of Rhetorical Communication in the City University of New York. He tells us in an introduction: ‘Now several societies exist for the purpose of studying Lewis’s thoughts; film rights to several of his books have been purchased, and filmed documentaries of his life have been produced; both popular and scholarly books on Lewis are being published with increasing frequency (so that the Modern Language Association cites Lewis as one of the most rapidly increasing objects of literary study in the world).’ Another critic, Mr Eugene McGovern, who ‘works in the field of casualty insurance on actuarial matters’, and who, with the exception of Professor Como himself, is the only contributor to the volume not to have been personally acquainted with Lewis, records the further impressive fact that Lewis’s works ‘at present sell at about two million copies per year’.

A good many years ago the late Sir John Masterman, when Provost of Worcester College, had the idea of creating a species of Sherlock Holmes Apocrypha. He wrote two or three short stories which appeared, I think, in an evening newspaper. I myself can recall nothing of them except a little joke. In the course of investigating a case of poisoning. Holmes has occasion to say to his old friend: ‘Alimentary, my dear Watson.’ The project came to a hall when Sir John was gently made aware of the fact that the name and character of the great detective constituted a copyright owned by the Conan Doyle estate. But now fifty years have elapsed since Conan Doyle’s death, and anybody that pleases can have a go at a Holmes story. The present example is perhaps most kindly described as extremely odd. In addition to Holmes and Watson the main characters are Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.N. Whitehead. J.M. Keynes and G.E. Moore. Rather in the role of what are coming to be known as ‘guest artists’, room is also found for Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. All these, together with Annie Besant, turn out to be goodies or near goodies, and over against them, as chief baddy, is Aleister Crowley, variously described as ‘the high priest of post-Edwardian mysticism’ and ‘the wickedest man in England’.

Paul Fussell’s aim in this book, he tells us in a preface, is ‘to suggest what it felt like to be young and clever and literate in the final age of travel’. Or, more precisely, what it thus felt like in Great Britain. ‘Because the most sophisticated travel books of the age are British, I have focused largely on them.’

Joseph Conrad died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at Aldington in Kent. Chance, Conrad’s first immediately popular success, appeared when the boy was seven, and The Shadow-Line Conrad’s last work of unimpaired quality, when he was 11. During his early teens the family’s fortunes were rapidly transformed: the more startlingly so because Conrad was an extravagant as well as a very generous man. At the time of his death he was living in a substantial country-house – rented, it is true – and employing a secretary, a valet/butler, a chauffeur, two housemaids and a cook, occasional ‘extra help from the village’, two gardeners, and eventually (for Mrs Conrad) a living-in nurse. Jessie Conrad, although seriously incapacitated by an injured knee which defied the surgical skill even of the eminent Sir Robert Jones, was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else.

It is probable that J.R.R. Tolkien was throughout his life a copious correspondent, but he appears to have been in his midforties before people took to preserving what he had addressed to them. Even so, Humphrey Carpenter has found that ‘an immense number’ of letters survive. In projecting the present selection, he realised that ‘an enormous quantity of material would have to be omitted’ and that ‘only passages of particular interest could be included.’ In the event, he has given priority to those letters in which Tolkien discusses his own books, but he has also worked with ‘an eye to demonstrating the huge range of Tolkien’s mind and interests’.