A New Exhibition: Tolkien and the Making of Middle-earth

I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien in college. The editions were likely the pirated ones controversially published by Ballantine; almost overnight it seemed everyone on campus was carrying their paperback copies. By the time I graduated, an authorized version of the books had been published in the United States, and I bought the hardbacks, which are well read and still on my bookshelf.

J.R.R. Tolkien in the 1920s

And the Peter Jackson movies from 2001 to 2003? My youngest son and I saw them three times each in the theaters, watched them again when the movies were available on CD, and watched them yet again when the extended version / director’s cut CDs went on sale. 

I’m a fan, but I’m not a fanatical fan. I wore street clothes to the movie theater. I did not dress up as a hobbit, a wizard, an orc, Stridor, an ent, an elf, a dwarf, a balrag, or Shelob the giant spider.

The biggest Tolkien event since the movies is now underway in Oxford. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Jane Potter’s “Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life”

We’ve visited London for vacation each of the last three years, and each year, some major event was happening in the city.

In 2012, we caught the very end of the Olympics and Paralympics, and waved our British flags during the parade to honor the athletes decreed by the Queen.

In 2013, it was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.

And this year, it was the 100^th anniversary of World War I. The city was filled with commemorations – the fantastic display of ceramic red poppies at the Tower of London and the

sobering World War I exhibition at the Imperial War Museum were just two of many. And there were books, books about the war, the poets and poetry of the war, the art of the war, and memoirs of the war.

As my wife will tell you, I like books.

In September, the Bodleian Library, Oxford published Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life by Jane Potter. Owen (1893-1918) has been the subject of `six recent biographies (not to mention others less recent). With Rupert Brooke, Owen is at the front of the line of the groups known collectively as the “World War I poets.” He is one of 16 World War I poets commemorated with a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey.

Potter’s illustrated history of his life is deceptively simple looking, almost like the kind of biography you might find in a middle school library. But it is carefully crafted, extraordinarily well researched, and engagingly written, drawing upon the extensive correspondence he maintained with his mother, his poetry, and a considerable number of sources and photographs from the English Language Faculty at Oxford.

The oldest of four children, he was the son of a railway clerk who had dreamed of settling in India and a mother who was decidedly evangelical. As he matured, he was undecided (or indecisive) about a profession or line of work, until the war intervened. He also had been writing poetry.

Owen didn’t enlist in the British Army until 1915. In 1917, suffering from what was then called shell shock (and what we today call Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder, or PTSD), he was sent to Craiglockhart, a hospital in Scotland specializing in shell shock cases. There he met Siegfried Sassoon, who had been sent to the hospital for a very different reason – to avoid a court-martial for a letter he wrote opposing the war (I posted an article on Sassoon’s The War Poems this week at Tweetspeak Poetry).

The friendship with Sassoon was pivotal for Owen’s poetry. Manuscripts of his poems with Sassoon’s emendations still exist (one is on display at the Imperial War Museum). His poetry changed and grew. It began to be noticed, and published.

Potter walks us through each phase of Owen’s short life, using pictures of childhood, family, friends and the military. Each section includes his poems at the end, adding a poignancy to the text. You look at the pictures of the young, the hope and expectancy in his face, and read his poems, and in a few short pages see a life of promise cut short.

One of his best known poems is this one:

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 

      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Owen almost survived the war. On Nov. 4, 1918, he was shot and killed by enemy fire alongside a canal.  A week later, on Armistice Day, his parents were informed of his death.

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

Talking About Detective Fiction with P.D. James

My wife and I were nosing around the gift shop of the Bodleian Library at Oxford during our recent vacation. She tugged on my sleeve and said, “Did you see the book by P.D. James?”

The book in question was Talking About Detective Fiction, packaged in an attractive boxed slipcover (= not inexpensive). Not only that, it was a numbered limited edition (No. 41 of 450) and autographed by the author. The Bodleian was using it as a fundraiser (see the Bodleian press notice). I looked at the back, half afraid to see the price – and was surprised to see only 30 pounds (about $48 US). (The regular edition is more reasonably priced.)

Since my wife pointed it out, how could I resist?

The truth is, I’ve been an admirer of P.D. James’ detective stories for a long time. I’ve read most of them; her hero Adam Dagleish is part of my reading history. She’s currently 92; she’s been writing for a long time. She received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her writing almost 30 years ago, and she continued to write after that. This particular book was published in 2009, and it has all of the sharp insight and understanding that she brings to her own detective stories.

This is a tour of the history of the detective story – where it came from, how it developed, and where it is today. James walks the reader through the origins – stories by Edgar Allen Poe, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (her nominee for the real start of detective fiction), and then the two authors who more than anyone else turned detective fiction into a distinct genre – Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and G.K. Chesterton (Father Brown).

James delves into the Golden Age of detective fiction and mysteries (roughly World War I to World War II), the popularity of women writers like Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey, and the contributions of the “hardboiled school” – the only Americans included (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) in an otherwise British history of the genre.

But Talking About Detective Fiction is more than a recitation of authors and their works. James examines what it is that makes a detective novel, how she herself started writing, how authors have stayed true or violated detective fiction norms (and who got away with it), and why these books have remained popular.

“We do not expect popular literature to be great literature,” she says, “but fiction which provides excitement, mystery and humour also ministers to essential human needs. We can honour and celebrate the genius which produced Middlemarch, War and Peace and Ulysses without devaluing Treasure Island, The Moonstone and The Inimitable Jeeves.”

James is a fine writer; she’s always been a fine writer, always bringing clarity, mystery and imagination to her stories. She’s managed to do the same thing with Talking About Detective Fiction.

And I’ve got a wonderful souvenir of the Bodleian and Oxford (James lives there, by the way), and of our vacation to the U.K. this past September. (And an autographed copy!)

Simon Callow and Charles Dickens

When we were in London in September, we had the opportunity to see two plays. First was a stage adaptation of the movie Chariots of Fire (complete with running track), timed for the Summer Olympics. The second was a one-man production, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, written by the writer (and Dickens biographer) Peter Ackroyd and starring the actor Simon Callow.

Ackroyd published his biography of Dickens in 1990, and by size alone it’s the be-all and end-all – weighing a hefty 3.6 pounds and more than a thousand pages in length. I read it a few years after it was published, largely because I was a speechwriter for a CEO, I had to read what he read, and he was reading Dickens. The collected works. Unabridged.

When we were in London, Dickens was in the air. This year is the 200^th anniversary of his birth. The Bodleian Library in Oxford had an exhibit called “Dickens and His World,” and we got to see that as well. Inexplicably, the Dickens Museum on Doughty Street in London was closed this year for renovation (someone might have managed the timing better).

I’ve been a reader of Dickens since high school. I read three of his novels as part of required course work – Great Expectations in ninth grade, A Tale of Two Cities in tenth grade, and David Copperfield my senior year.

Dickens was known, particularly in his later years, not only for his books but also his public readings. Those readings included A Christmas Carol and his other Christmas stories, as well as selected scenes from his other novels. He did just read; he acted them out. He would essentially play all of the characters in the scene or story, and he could play the female parts as well as he played the male roles.

During the play’s intermission, I told my wife that I was wondering if Callow would do the most famous public reading by Dickens of all of them – the one that likely contributed to his death in 1870 at age 58. This is the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, and it is a scene of excessive violence. Dickens’ “performance” of this reading was so realistic and horrifying that it caused many in his audiences to scream and faint.

After the intermission, I sat and waited to see. And Callow did it – he performed the scene, and he managed to show what was so powerful about Dickens in his public readings – his almost desperate desire to connect with his readers (and audiences).

There is likely no one better qualified than Simon Callow to write about the influence of the theater on Charles Dickens – on his novels, his readings, and indeed his entire life. Tomorrow I’ll be posting a review of Callow’s Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World.