Guest Post by Tom Robertson
The little knots of friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it. -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Joseph Loconte gives needed attention to the part played by the Great War – the “cataclysm of 1914-1918,” as he calls it – in helping to shape the men we would come to know, simply as Tolkien and Lewis. This horrific experience, far from killing the imaginations of these beloved men, and far from causing them to retreat from the world, provided a context for friendship and imagination. Rather than extinguishing the idea of heroism and of true friendship, as it did for many of their contemporaries, their imaginations were aflame with deep fellowships, enduring love, ultimate sacrifice, and epic valor.
Loconte has managed to capture the spirit of the rapidly changing culture that existed both before and after World War I while presenting Tolkien and Lewis as valiant men in their own right, who not only resisted the lure of “the myth of progress,” which helped to usher in the Great War, but emerged to become hopeful, prolific, influential men even after the myth was shattered. One is presented with two men who, against all odds, helped one another swim against the stream of pessimism, pacifism, and realism that flooded the literary imaginations of postwar Europe as the great myth burst. And they did this in the most heroic fashion. Loconte says although “the Great War produced many cynics and pacifists” who found “nothing heroic about the folly of war, yet, as veterans of this conflict, Tolkien and Lewis chose to remember not only its horrors and sorrows: they wanted to recall the courage, sacrifice, and the friendships that made it endurable.” These two, with the encouragement of their little knot of friends – ‘The Inklings’, as they called themselves – provided a little rivulet of their own.
Their hopeful stories, filled with heartbreaking tragedy, acts of valor, and happy endings, provide a spring of cool fresh water for many thirsty would-be Hobbits and Narnians. They are the kind of stories that are seeded in the experience of pain and watered by joy. “It is a good bet,” says Loconte, “that only men who…experienced [friendships] on the field of combat…could write passages of such compassion, grit, and courage.” The Inklings, says Loconte, was their attempt “to recapture something like the camaraderie that sustained them during” the Great War. “It is a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” In A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, And A Great War, Loconte has given us a book which may very well serve to inspire the next “little knot of friends” to enter into the “dangerous business…of going out your door,” and to “turn their back’s on the ‘World.'” For they, like Lewis and Tolkien, may one day be “those who really transform it.”
