PART TWO.
THE NOTION CLUB
PAPERS.
THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS.
Introduction.
On 18 December 1944, when The Lord of the Rings had reached the
end of what would become The Two Towers (and a few pages had
been written of 'Minas Tirith' and 'The Muster of Rohan' at the
beginning of Book V), my father wrote to me (Letters no. 92) that he
had seen C. S. Lewis that day: 'His fourth (or fifth?) novel is brewing,
and seems likely to clash with mine (my dimly projected third). I have
been getting a lot of new ideas about Prehistory lately (via Beowulf
and other sources of which I may have written) and want to work
them into the long shelved time-travel story I began. C. S. L. is
planning a story about the descendants of Seth and Cain.' His words
are tantalizingly difficult to interpret; but by 'clash with mine' he
surely meant that the themes of their books ran rather close.(1)
Whatever lies behind this, it is seen that he was at this time turning
his thoughts to a renewed attempt on the 'time-travel story', which
would issue a year later in The Notion Club Papers. In his letter to
Stanley Unwin of 21 July 1946 (Letters no. 105) he said that he hoped
very shortly 'actually to - write', to turn again to The Lord of the
Rings where he had left it, more than a year and a half before: 'I shall
now have to study my own work in order to get back to it,' he wrote.
But later in that same letter he said:
I have in a fortnight of comparative leisure round about last
Christmas written three parts of another book, taking up in an
entirely different frame and setting what little had any value in the
inchoate Lost Road (which I had once the impudence to show you: I
hope it is forgotten), and other things beside. I hoped to finish this in
a rush, but my health gave way after Christmas. Rather silly to
mention it, till it is finished. But I am putting The Lord of the Rings,
the Hobbit sequel, before all else, save duties that I cannot wriggle
out of.
So far as I have been able to discover there is no other reference to The
Notion Club Papers anywhere in my father's writings.
But the quantity of writing constituting The Notion Club Papers,
and the quantity of writing associated with them, cannot by any
manner of means have been the work of a fortnight. To substantiate
this, and since this is a convenient place to give this very necessary
information, I set out here the essential facts of the textual relations of
all this material, together with some brief indication of their content.
As the development of The Notion Club Papers progressed my
father divided it into two parts, the second of which was never
completed, and although he ultimately rejected this division (2) I have
found it in every way desirable to preserve it in this book. Part One
was 'The Ramblings of Michael Ramer: Out of the Talkative Planet', "
and this consists of a report in direct speech of the discussions at two
successive meetings (3) of 'the Notion Club' at Oxford far in the future
at the time of writing. On the first of these occasions the conversation
turned on the problem of the vehicle, the machine or device, by which
'space-travellers' are transported to their destination, especially in
respect of its literary credibility in itself and its effect on the story
contained within the journeys; on the second, of which the report is..
much longer, one of the members, Michael Ramer, expounded his
ideas concerning 'true dreams' and his experiences of 'space-travel' in
dream.
The earliest manuscript, here called 'A', is a complete text of Part
One. It is roughly written and hastily expressed, there is no title or
explanatory 'scene-setting', and there are no dates; but while the text
would undergo much expansion and improvement, the essential
structure and movement of the dialogue was already largely present.
The second manuscript, 'B', is also a complete text of Part One,
but is much fuller than A, and (with many changes and additions)
advances far towards the final form. Here also the two meetings, as the
text was first written, have no dates, and the numbers given to the
meetings imply a much longer history of the Club than is suggested for
it subsequently. For the elaborate title or prolegomenon to this version
see pp. 148 - 9.
The third manuscript, 'C', is written in a fine script, but is not quite
complete: it extends to Ramer's words 'So there does appear to be at
least one other star with attendant planets' (p. 207), and it is clear that
no more was written of this text (which, incidentally, it would have
taken days to write).
A typescript 'D', made by my father, is the final form of Part One. In
one section of the text, however, D seems to have preceded C, since it-
has some B readings which were then changed to those of C; but the
final form of the text is scarcely ever in doubt, and even where it is the
differences are entirely trivial. Where C ends, the typescript follows B,
the place of transition being marked on the B manuscript. (A second
typescript - not, I think, made by my father - was begun, but
abandoned after only a few pages; this has no independent value.)
Part Two, 'The Strange Case of Arundel Lowdham', records a
number of further meetings of the Notion Club, continuous with those
of Part One. This second Part is largely devoted to the intrusion of the
Matter of Numenor into the discussions of the Notion Club, but of
this there are only two texts, a manuscript ('E') and a typescript ('F').
. goth end at the same point, with the next meeting of the Club
arranged and dated, but never written.
The typescript F is a complex document, in that my father rejected a
substantial section of it ('F 1') as soon as he had typed it, replaced it
('F 2'), and then continued on to the end, the structure of the text
being thus F 1, F 1 > F 2, F 2 (see p. 237 and note 37).
For both Parts, but especially for Part Two, there is a quantity of
rough, discontinuous drafting, often scarcely legible.
While Part Two was being further developed (that is, after the
completion of the manuscript E so far as it went) the Adunaic *
language emerged (as it appears), with an abandoned but elaborate
account of the phonology, and pari passu with The Notion Club
Papers my father not only wrote a first draft of an entirely new version
of the story of Numenor but developed it through further texts: this is
The Drowning of Anadune, in which all the names are in Adunaic.
How is all this to be equated with his statement in the letter to
Stanley Unwin in July 1946 that 'three parts' of the work were written
in a fortnight at the end of 1945? Obviously it cannot be, not even on
the supposition that when he said 'a fortnight' he greatly underesti-
mated the time. Though not demonstrable, an extremely probable
explanation, as it seems to me, is that at the end of that fortnight he
stopped work in the middle of writing the manuscript E, at the point
where The Notion Club Papers end, and at which time Adunaic had
not yet arisen. Very probably Part One was at the stage of the
manuscript B.(4) On this view, the further development of what had
then been achieved of Part One, and more especially of Part Two
(closely associated with that of the Adunaic language and the writing
of The Drowning of Anadune), belongs to the following year, the
earlier part of 1946. Against this, of course, is the fact that the letter to
Stanley Unwin in which my father referred to the Papers was written
in July 1946, but that letter gives no impression of further work after
'my health gave way after Christmas'. But it is to be remembered that
The Lord of the Rings had been at a halt for more than a year and a
half, and it may well be that he was deeply torn between the
burgeoning of Adunaic and Anadune and the oppression of the
abandoned Lord of the Rings. He did not need to spell out to Stanley
Unwin what he had in fact been doing! But he said that he was 'putting
The Lord of the Rings before all else', which no doubt meant 'I am
now going to put it before all else', and that included Adunaic. To the
interrupted Notion Club Papers he never returned.
The diverse and shifting elements in all this work, not least the
complex but essential linguistic material, have made the construction
(* Adunaic is always so spelt at this time (not Adunaic), and I write it so
throughout.)
of a readily comprehensible edition extremely difficult, requiring much
experimentation among possible forms of presentation. Since The
Notion Club Papers are now published for the first time, the final
typescripts D of Part One and F of Part Two must obviously be the
text printed, and this makes for difficulties of presentation (it is of
course very much easier to begin with an original draft and to relate it
by consecutive steps to a final form that is already known). The two
Parts are separated, with notes following each Part. Following the text
of the Papers I give important sections that were rejected from or sig-
nificantly changed in the final text, earlier forms of the 'Numenorean'
fragments that 'came through' to Arundel Lowdham and of the
Old English text written by his father, and reproductions of the
'facsimiles' of that text with analysis of the tengwar.
Although the final text of Part Two of the Papers and The Drown-
ing of Anadune were intimately connected,(5) especially in respect of
Adunaic, any attempt to combine them in a single presentation makes
for inextricable confusion; the latter is therefore treated entirely separ-
ately in the third part of this book, and in my commentary on Part
Two of the Papers I have not thought it useful to make continual
reference forward to The Drowning of Anadune: the interrelations
between the two works emerge more clearly when the latter is reached.
There are some aspects of the framework of the Papers, provided
by the Foreword of the Editor, Mr. Howard Green, and the list of
members of the Notion Club, which are better discussed here than in
the commentary.
The Foreword.
The original manuscript A of Part One, as already noticed, has no
title or introductory statement of any kind, but begins with the words
'When Ramer had finished reading his latest story...' The first page of
B begins thus:
Beyond Lewis
or
Out of the Talkative Planet.
Being a fragment of an apocryphal Inklings' Saga, made
by some imitator at some time in the 1980s.
Preface to the Inklings.
While listening to this fantasia (if you do), I beg of the
present company not to look for their own faces in this
mirror. For the mirror is cracked, and at the best you
will only see your countenances distorted, and adorned
maybe with noses (and other features) that are not your
own, but belong to other members of the company -
if to anybody.
Night 251.
When Michael Ramer had finished reading his latest story...
This was heavily emended and then struck through, and was replaced
by a new, separate title-page (made when B had been completed):
Beyond Probability (6)
or
Out of the Talkative Planet.
The Ramblings of Ramer
being Nights 251 and 252 of The Notion Club Papers.
[Little is known about this rare book, except that
it appears to have been written after 1989, as an
apocryphal imitation of the Inklings' Saga Book. The
author identifies himseif with the character called in the
narrative Nicholas Guildford; but Titmouse has shown
that this is a pseudonym, and is taken from a mediaeval
dialogue, at one time read in the Schools of Oxford. His
real identity remains unknown.]
An aside to the audience. While listening to this hotch-
potch (if you do), I beg of the present company not to
look for their own faces in my mirror. For the mirror is
cracked...
This is followed by a list of the persons who appear (see p. 151). It
seems clear that at the stage when the text B was written my father's
idea was far less elaborate than it became; intending perhaps, so far
as the form was concerned, no more than a jeu d'esprit for the
entertainment of the Inklings - while the titles seem to emphasise that
it was to be, in patt, the vehicle of criticism and discussion of aspects
of Lewis's 'planetary' novels. Perhaps he called to mind the witty and
ingenious method that Lewis had devised for his criticism of The Lay
of Leithian in 1930 (see The Lays of Beleriand, p. 151). - So far as I
can see, there is no indication that at this stage he envisaged the form
that Part Two of the Papers would take, and definite evidence to the
contrary (see pp. 281 - 2).
There are several drafts for a more circumstantial account of the
Papers and of how they came to light, preceding the elaborate form in
the final text that follows. They were found at the University Press
waiting to be pulped, but no one knew how they had got there; or they
were found 'at Messrs. Whitburn and Thoms' publishing house'.(7)
The mediaeval dialogue from which the name Nicholas Guildford
is derived is The Owl and the Nightingale, a debate in verse written
between 1189 and 1216. To the Owl's question, who shall decide
between them, the Nightingale replies that Maister Nichole of Gulde-
forde is the obvious choice, since he is prudent, virtuous, and wise, and
an excellent judge of song.
The List of Members.
At the top of a page that preceded the manuscript A and is almost
certainly the first setting down of the opening passage of Night 60 of ',
the Papers (see p. 211, note 7) my father wrote these names:
Ramer Latimer Franks Loudham Dolbear
Beneath Ramer he wrote 'Self', but struck it out, then 'CSL' and 'To',
these also being struck out. Beneath Latimer he wrote 'T', beneath
Franks 'CSL', beneath Loudham 'HVD' (Hugo Dyson), and beneath
Dolbear 'Havard'.
This is the only actual identification of members of the Notion Club
with members of the Inklings that is found. The name Latimer (for
Guildford) remained that of the Club's 'reporter' in manuscript A; it is
derived from Old French latinier ('Latiner', speaker of Latin), meaning
an interpreter. Loudham (so spelt in A and B, and initially in the
manuscript E of Part Two) would obviously be Dyson even without
'HVD' written beneath (see Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, pp.
212 - 13); and since Franks (only becoming Frankley in the third text
C) is here Lewis, I suppose that my father felt that the name was
appropriate to his character. The other two names were presumably
'significant', but I do not know what the significance was. Dolbear is
an uncommon surname, but there was a chemist's shop in Oxford
called Dolbear & Goodall, and I recollect that my father found this
particularly engaging; it may be that he simply found in Dolbear the
chemist a comic appropriateness to Havard, or to Havard as he was
going to present him. Ramer is very puzzling; and here there is no
certain identification with one of the Inklings in the list. The various
dictionaries of English surnames that I have consulted do not give the
name. The only suggestion that I can make is that my father derived it
from the dialectal verb rame, with these meanings given in the Oxford
English Dictionary: 'to shout, cry aloud, scream; keep up the same
cry, continue repeating the same thing; obtain b
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