How Writers Live, Tolkien Edition

I enjoyed taking the time this week to read Nicole duPlessis's article "On the Shoulders of Humphrey Carpenter: Reconsidering Biographical Representation and Scholarly Perception of Edith Tolkien" from the Mythopoeic Society's scholarly journal Mythlore.

Carpenter's 1977 authorized biography of Tolkien remains the standard work on the author. Carpenter had greater access to unpublished family diaries and letters than any subsequent biographer, so his work holds a sort of canonical status in shaping perceptions of Tolkien's life. However, as duPlessis writes, Carpenter brought to the table his own interpretive biases, in particular regarding Tolkien's religion and his marriage. In regards to religion, Carpenter saw Tolkien's Catholic faith as a sort of substitute love and loyalty for the feelings Tolkien had felt towards his mother, who died when Tolkien was still in his youth. In regards to marriage, Carpenter finds Tolkien's family life surprisingly prosaic.

“It is a strange paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford professor […] who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden.”

Tolkien's wife Edith comes in a fair amount of blame for this "strange paradox" in Carpenter's telling. He portrays her as not being Tolkien's intellectual equal (though a highly skilled pianist, she was not an academic or a writer) and her desire to keep some sort of order with their home and four children is portrayed as pulling Tolkien away from the creative life he should have been living.

This strikes me as one of the interesting unstated assumptions of Carpenter's biography as analyzed in duPlessis's paper: that there is some particular life that a creative person such as a novelist should be living, and that the occupations of home living and raising children are not part of that life.

Really, though, what can we say of substance about a writer's life other than that he or she writes? Some live obviously colorful existences, others are notably quiet ones. It's hardly surprising from Tolkien's portrayal of hobbit existence that he himself valued a quiet life. duPlessis notes:

Here it is worth recalling Lewis’s description of Tolkien as “the most married man he knew,”

And indeed, although Tolkien had been working on the poems and stories that would eventually give rise to the Silmarillion for many years, Tolkien's entrance into print with The Hobbit saw its origin as a bedtime story told to his children, surely an appropriate origin for the work of "the most married man" Lewis knew.

I'd strongly recommend reading duPlessis's entire article. While the particular aspect that struck me had to do with ideas of the "writer's life", the main focus of the article is actually on Edith, someone clearly very important to Tolkien himself (on their shared gravestone the inscription describes her as the Luthien to his Beren) and yet whom Carpenter treats as an obviously mis-matched spouse.