Sunday 8 May 2016

Arry Lowdham = Tom Shippey - another Notion Club Member identified!

I have just realized that Arry Lowdham is meant to be Professor Tom (T.A.) Shippey - lightly disguised, but unmistakeable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Shippey

Of course Lowdham is a philologist with an interest in the same kind of languages as Shippey, Lowdham is described as robust, strong and dark; he is, 'noisy', witty, sporty (but sailing, not rugby), convivial; enjoys debating, drinking, singing and rhyming (I'm guessing TAS also likes these last two?) - but the give-away is when Lowdham (humorously) states: "I'm a philologist, which means a misunderstood man."

As for the philological identification - I am no expert... But it is pretty obvious that Lowdham's fascination with sailing boats is a sly reference to Ship-pey, and 'Arry' to the slang phrase 'Tom, Dick and [H]arry'.

Lowdham's date of birth is given as 1938, which is slightly wrong for TAS - and the NCPs were written in 1945-6; which, since Prof Shippey was born in 1943, might superficially be supposed to rule-out the identification I am proposing - except that a main topic of the NCPs is about strange (almost exact) previsions and the like, with JRRT predicting the great storm of 1987 (almost...) exactly.

Anyway, now it has been pointed-out, I am sure it will be generally acknowledged that Tom Shippey was in fact a 'real life' member of the fictional Notion Club, and (as appropriate for Tolkien's greatest scholar and critic) has been (in his essence, at least) predictively-immortalized in one of JRRT's works - albeit an obscure, incomplete and posthumously-published one...

(?!)

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if Tolkien read Eliot's 'Little Gidding', either when it first came out in October 1942, or when it came out in book form later? Its "familiar compound ghost" in any case has me thinking how the Notion Club figures often seem 'compound', with one of the 'familiar' people 'compounded' into them repeatedly being Tolkien himself. (There's that fascinating remark to Christopher in a 1944 letter, too, about the origins of 'romance' in 'allegory', and in the psychomachia in particular. Williams often makes use of one or another 'analysis' of someone or something into a set of 'figures', such as 'Man' into 'King Arthur and his knights'. Might part of what's 'going on' in the Notion Club Papers be some kind of similar 'figural analysis' of Tolkien himself?)

David Llewellyn Dodds

Bruce Charlton said...

@David

"with one of the 'familiar' people 'compounded' into them repeatedly being Tolkien himself."

Part one of the NCP has Ramer who has multiple points of identification with Tolkien, then in Part two the focus moves to Lowdham who also has many similarities; and then Old Rashbold is also mentioned - whose name is a translation of Tolkien! All are philologists.

As I have written - for me, one of the enduring fascinations of NCP is the deep autobiographical quality that comes through - I cannot think of any other writing by Tolkien when he was so 'open' (behind what is a rather thin fictional cover) about his deepest (and strangest) experiences and yearnings.

Anonymous said...

I still haven't caught up with all your posts, so I don't know whether or not you have written anything comparing and contrasting what seems to be going on in the Notion Club Papers with the Theosophical-Anthroposophical idea(s) of the "Akashic records". (The current Wikipedia article bearing that title seems pretty good, and the Internet Archive has a scan of a reprint of Steiner's Aus der Akasha-Chronik mentioned there, though only in German!) I also can't remember if 'Gareth Knight' discusses this in The Magical World of the Inklings (the first edition of which I've read). My impression of the big difference between the Notion Club Papers and the "Akashic records" (from the little that I've read about them) is, that the NCP seem concerned with possible actual non-bodily travel through time and space, rather than the consultation of 'records' about events, experiences, etc.

Brooding over Williams's poem, 'Mount Badon' (published in 1938), it suddenly struck me that part of Taliessin's experience there - apparently witnessing Virgil writing part of the Aeneid - makes for an interesting comparison with some of what seems to be going on in the NCP (which is not to say a source of influence, but perhaps somehow having reached something similar - though one can imagine that similarity coming up in conversation, if Tolkien read out parts of the NCP to an audience including Lewis and Williams).

David Llewellyn Dodds

Bruce Charlton said...

@David - I only found out about the idea of 'Akashic Records' quite recently - but they seem to be regarded as a true history, presumably of divine origin - therefore necessarily correct - although people may err in reading/ reporting them. WHereas the material being 'telepathically' observed in the NCPs is of fallible human (often elvish) origin - actual manuscripts which are being remotely observed. So the parallel with Mount Badon is closer than with Steiner.

Williams's role in teh NCPs is fascinating. The story is extremely Williams-esque - esepcially the part when the 'clairvoyant' activities of the Notion Club draw up the storm that sunk Numenor to batter modern (1987) England - this is very much like the start of the trouble in the Place of the Lion in which Berringer's spiritual contact with archetypal forces provides a route for them through into the modern world.

It is negatively-interesting (!) that none of the Notion Club are depcited to be like Williams - and I assume this is because he had only just died when the NCPs were begun, and it would have seemed wrong and also sadness provoking to 'fictionalize' Williams in the context of what began as a humourous self-pardoy of The Inklings.

As Christopher Tolkien describes the chronology, Williams had died some months before the NCPs were begun. Indeed, I suspect that Williams death was linked to Tolkien's desire to write about the Inklings - since Tolkien was (contrary to what seems to have become received knowledge) very good friends with Williams - and could not fail to have been significantly upset at his sudden demise.

https://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/was-tolkien-jealous-of-charles-williams.html

Anonymous said...

Very interesting! - idiotically enough, I had not thought about the storm in that way (being rather bewildered by it, in fact - but I've only read the NCP completely once, so far, and have only begun puzzling piecemeal... so far, mostly about the mysterious dates!).

My 'feel' of things is that the playful reference apparently in both A and B to Williams and The Octopus (p. 219 in my paperback ed.) must have been drafted while he was still alive and meant to be read out in his hearing - and that its absence in C and D means they were prepared after his sudden death, providing, as I take it, a terminus a quo for at least that passage of them.

Unfortunately, I am not sure of the finest points of the composition history of The House of the Octopus and when he (is likely to have) read bits of it to them as he wrote it - I don't know it by heart, and my most detailed notes would take some nearly literal 'excavating' - but they may only show that I am not sure 'we' know the details minutely (though there are a lot of Margaret Douglas and Raymond Hunt letters and papers I have not read and taken notes on, and the parts of Warnie's diary not selected for publication, so the details may be 'out there').

Mrs. Hadfield seems to suggest it followed The Figure of Beatrice (which she says was published "about the end of June" 1943) and the Arthurian poems for The Region of the Summer Stars (sometime around the end of May 1943?), and says, "In 1944 he [...] continued work on The House of the Octopus (pp. 206, 216, 226 of her 1983 book).

Grevel Lindop provides a lot more detail. He notes that when he discussed the commission to write it "in mid-October" 1943, "he told her he could write the play between March and September of the following year, 1944" (p. 380). And, he reports Williams actually began work on it after a speech at "the end of May" 1944, and was still working on the second act in August, until "Somehow The House of the Octopus was finished: he had proofs in February 1945" (p. 400). That gives us a range, and I suppose sometime after the end of May 1944 is a likely terminus a quo for A and B.

The idea of how Tolkien may have worked on NCP in the light of Williams's death is one deserving careful consideration!

David Llewellyn Dodds

Bruce Charlton said...

@David

Thanks for that detail concerning Octopus. My impression is that Tolkien must have liked that play, or considered it important in some way - or else he would not have mentioned it.

These are my speculations about identifications of the NC wit the Inklings - including trying to understand why Williams is not one of them:

https://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Williams+Jeremy

My feeling is that the absence of Williams as a person is significant - but, as I said, the whole conception of the NCPs is extremely Williams-esque - as much, or more, so as That Hideous Strength:

https://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/tolkien-and-lewiss-annus-divertium-of.html

BTW did you see my Potl - LotR stinking pterodactyl link?

https://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/tolkiens-stinking-nazgul-pterodactyl-in.html

[Probably unconnected, from the NCPs, is Frankley's attributed 1989 publication Experiments in Pterodactylics!]

Anonymous said...

As to Jeremy, I should reread and brood, but there are comments by people who knew him about a 'boyish' or youthful quality C.W. had or impression made (though I'd have to search for details).

It is fascinating to try to consider 'where' NCPs - and The Dark Tower - might have gone, and what 'overt' or allusively obvious Williams-like characters might have been developed, if both he had not died suddenly, and they had written on.

Yes, the pterodactyl (so named in C.W.) and pt.-like creatures in LotR are interesting to consider together. Also as to how they're used - the PotL one re. Damaris's uses and abuses of the 'good of intellect' and in how far the pterodactyl is how she experiences the Eagle (cf. Anthony's pit-in-the-house experience) of its negative double (?), and Tolkien's making them quite concrete, and yet the results of Sauron's abuse of both intelligence and (presumably, as definitely with the earlier horses) of living creatures. (My memories of 'reptile houses' during zoo visits and of my own pet lizards are that reptiles can be smelly, so such similar practical experience on the parts of C.W. and Tolkien may also feed into the matter.)

I wonder what Lewis and Tolkien (and, say, Coghill, if around) may have said of C.W.'s adaptation of Hildegard of Bingen in The Octopus? I've never yet checked, but this wonderful site will be useful in comparing his source and use:

http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.nl/

David Llewellyn Dodds

Whitmonday (a good day for thinking about the works of Hildegard! - also, the 71st anniversary of Williams's death...)

Anonymous said...

Crystal Hurd's guest post at The Oddest Inkling quoting

Over Camelot and Carbonek a whirling creature hovered
As over the Adam in Eden when they found themselves uncovered,
When they would know good as evil;

makes me wonder if Lewis connected that with the pterodactyl - and went quoting it to Tolkien (!) (or maybe just thought about it years later when he heard about the new mounts of the Nazgul).

My apologies for the muddly date above: it was Whitmonday on this side of the Atlantic while it was still the anniversary of Williams's death in parts of North America and parts of the Pacific.

David Llewellyn Dodds

David Llewellyn Dodds

Anonymous said...

I've just read Andrew H. Morton and John Hayes' Tolkien's Gedling 1914: The Birth of Legend (2008) and was interested to learn of Tolkien's "dearest aunt Jane" Neave that "her faith was informed by mystical Christian figures like the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and the mystic Julian of Norwich" (p. 22) and that the reason she lived for a while in the early 1930s in Chelmsford is likely (though not certain) to have been to be near Evelyn Underhill and the Pleshey retreat (p. 21). She sounds like she might well have enjoyed reading Charles Williams! (Perhaps, to go a-speculating freely, there's even some connection between conversations with Aunt Jane and St. Hildegard adapted in The House of the Octopus!)

David Llewellyn Dodds