Sauron Defeated (27 page)

It may be mentioned here that my father had evidently discussed with Lewis the matter of 'true dreams': an important element in the plot of That Hideous Strength is Jane Studdock's 'tendency to dream real things', in the words of Miss Ironwood (Chapter 3, $iii), and this can hardly be a mere coincidence. It is presumably not coincidental either that there should be so many references to

'Numinor' in That Hideous Strength (published in 1945); see p. 303 and note 15.

2. On the final text D of Part One the heading of the first page (after Leaves from the Notion Club Papers ): Part I / The Ramblings of Michael Ramer / Out of the Talkative Planet' was struck out. The final text F of Part Two has no heading at the beginning. A pencilled title page apparently accompanying the manuscript E has 'Leaves from the Notion Club Papers / II / The Strange Case of Arundel Lowdham'.

3. A very brief report of an earlier meeting was added at the beginning of the text in the course of the development of Part One.

4. A pointer to this is the fact that in B the name is spelt Loudham throughout; in E it begins as Loudham but becomes Lowdham in the course of the writing of the manuscript; in C it is Lowdham from the first. See further p. 282.

5. Cf. the close relation of the manuscript of The Lost Road and the original text of The Fall of Numenor, V.9.

6. Beyond Probability is a pun on the title of Lewis's book Beyond Personality, which had been published in 1944.

7. That Whitburn (and Thoms) is a play on the name Blackwell, the Oxford bookseller and publisher, is seen from the fact that the firm was originally Basil Blackwell and Mott.

Leaves from

THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS.

FOREWORD.

These Papers have a rather puzzling history. They were found after the Summer Examinations of 2012 on the top of one of a number of sacks of waste paper in the basement of the Examination Schools at Oxford by the present editor, Mr.

Howard Green, the Clerk of the Schools. They were in a disordered bundle, loosely tied with red string. The outer sheet, inscribed in large Lombardic capitals:

NOTION CLUB PAPERS,

attracted the notice of Mr. Green, who removed them and scrutinized them. Discovering them to contain much that was to him curious and interesting, he made all possible enquiries, without result.

The Papers, from internal evidence, clearly had no connexion with any examinations held or lectures given in the Schools during Mr. Green's many years of office. Neither did they belong to any of the libraries housed in the building. Advertise-ment has failed to find any claimant to ownership. It remains unknown how the Papers reached the waste-paper sack. It seems probable that they had at some time been prepared for publication, since they are in many places provided with notes; yet in form they are nothing more than an elaborate minute-book of a club, devoted to conversation, debate, and the discussion of 'papers', in verse or prose, written and read by its members, and many of the entries have no particular interest for non-members.

The minutes, or reports, covered probably about 100 meetings or 'nights' during the years of last century, approximately 1980 to 1990. It is, however, not the least curious fact about these Papers that no such club appears ever to have existed.

Though certain resemblances are inevitable between a group of imaginary academic persons and their real contemporaries, no such persons as those here depicted, either with such names, or such offices, or such tastes and habits, can be traced in the Oxford of the last generation, or of the present time.

The author appears in one or two passages, and in the occasional notes, to identify himself with the character called in -': the dialogues Nicholas Guildford. But Mr. J. R. Titmass, the well-known historian of twentieth-century Oxford, who has given all possible assistance to the present editor, has shown that this is certainly a fictitious name and derived from a mediaeval dialogue at one time read in the Schools of Oxford.

On examination the bundle was found to contain 205

foolscap pages, all written by one hand, in a careful and usually legible script. The leaves were disarranged but mostly numbered. The bundle contains the entries for Nights 51 to 75, but they are defective and several leaves appear to have been lost; some of the longer entries are incomplete. It is probable that three other bundles, containing Nights 1 - 25, 26 - 50, 76 - 100, once existed. Of the missing sections, however, only a few scattered sheets were found in the sack, and these, so far as can be discerned, belonged originally to the entries 1 - 25. Among them was a crumpled and much corrected sheet, of a different paper, containing a list of members.

The total on this scale would have made a volume of considerable bulk, but its size will be overestimated, if calculation is based on the length of the extracts here printed. Many Nights are represented only by a few lines, or by short entries, of which Nights 54 and 64 have been included as specimens. As a rule these short items have been omitted, unless they bear closely on the longer reports here selected and presented to those interested in literary curiosities.

Note to the Second Edition.

Mr. W. W. Wormald of the School of Bibliopoly, and Mr.

D. N. Borrow of the Institute of Occidental Languages, found their curiosity aroused by the published extracts, and asked Mr.

Green for permission to examine the manuscript of the Papers.

They have now sent in a joint report, which raises some interesting points.

'Paper of this kind,' they write, 'is, of course, very difficult to trace or to date. The sheets submitted to us are of a poor quality much inferior to the paper now in general use for such purposes.

Without venturing on a definite opinion, we record our suspicion that these sheets are much older than the dates of the supposed meetings of the Club, perhaps 40 to 50 years older, belonging, that is, to the period during or just after the Six Years' War. This suspicion is supported by various items of internal evidence, notably the idiom of the dialogues, which is old-fashioned and does not represent with any fidelity the colloquial language either of the nineteen-eighties or of the present time. We conclude, then, that The Notion Club Papers were written sixty years ago, or more.

'It remains, nonetheless, on this hypothesis a puzzling fact that the Great Explosion of 1975 is referred to, and even more precisely, the Great Storm, which actually occurred on the night of Thursday, June 12th, 1987;(1) though certain inaccuracies appear in the account given of the progress and effects of the latter event. Mr. Green has proposed to us a curious explanation of this difficulty, evidently suggested to him by the contents of the Papers: the future events were, he thinks, "foreseen". In our opinion a less romantic but more probable solution is this: the paper is part of a stock purchased by a man resident in Oxford about 1940. He used the paper for his minutes (whether fictitious or founded on fact), but he did not use all his stock.

Much later (after 1987) he copied out his matter again, using up the old paper; and though he did not make any general revision, he moved the dates forward and inserted the genuine references to the Explosion and the Storm.'

Mr. Green rejoins: 'This is one of the most fantastic "probable solutions" I have yet met, quite apart from the unlikelihood of an inferior paper being stored for about fifty years and then used for the same purpose again. The writer was not, I think, a very young man; but the handwriting is certainly not that of an old man. Yet if the writer was not young in 1940, he must have been old, very old, in 2000. For it is to that date, not to 1987, that we must look. There is a point that has escaped the notice of Messrs. Wormald and Borrow: the old house, no. 100

Banbury Road, the last private dwelling house in that block, was in fact the scene of "hauntings",* a remarkable display of poltergeist activity, between the years 2000 and 2003, which only ended when the house was demolished and a new building, attached to the Institute of National Nutrition, erected on the site. In the year 2003 a person possessed of the paper, the (* See Night 61, p. 179.)

pen-habits,* and the idiom of the period of the Six Years' War would have been an oddity that no pseudonym could conceal from us.

'In any case, the Storm is integral to all the entries from Night 63 to Night, [sic] and is not just "inserted". Messrs. Wormald and Borrow must either neglect their own evidence and place the whole composition after 1987, or else stick to their own well-founded suspicions of the paper, the hand,* and the idiom, and admit that some person or persons in the nineteen-forties possessed a power of "prevision".

'Mr. Titmass informs me that he cannot find any record in the nineteen-forties of the names given in the list. If therefore, any such club existed at that earlier period, the names remain pseudonyms. The forward dating might have been adopted as an additional screen. But I am now convinced that the Papers -'.

are a work of fiction; and it may well be that the predictions (notably of the Storm), though genuine and not coincidences, were unconscious: giving one more glimpse of the strange processes of so-called literary "invention", with which the Papers are largely concerned.'

MEMBERS OF THE NOTION CLUB.

The Notion Club, as depicted, was informal and vague in outline. A number of characters appear in the dialogues, some rarely or fitfully. For the convenience of readers the List of Members found among the Papers is here printed, though several of the persons named do not appear in this selection.

The order is not alphabetical and seems intended to represent some kind of seniority: the first six names were written earlier and larger; the rest were added at various times and in different inks, but in the same hand. There are also later entries inserted after some of the names, recording details of their tastes or history. A few further details, gleaned from the Papers themselves, have been added in brackets.

(* Mr. Wormald himself, something of an expert in such matters, before he proposed his 'probable solution', ventured the opinion that the handwriting of the Papers in general character went with the old-fashioned idiom and belonged to the same period. The use of a pen rather than a typewriter would indeed, in itself, already have been most unusual for a man of 1990, whatever his age.)

MICHAEL GEORGE RAMER. Jesus College. Born 1929

(in Hungary). Professor of Finno-Ugric Philology; but better known as a writer of romances. His parents returned to England when he was four; but he spent a good deal of time in Finland and Hungary between 1956 and 68. [Among his interests are Celtic languages and antiquities.]

RUPERT DOLBEAR. Wadham. Born 1929. Research Chemist. Has many other interests, notably philosophy, psychoanalysis, and gardening. [A close friend of Ramer. He is redhaired and redbearded, and known to the Club as Ruthless Rufus.]

NICHOLAS GUILDFORD. Lincoln. Born 1937. Archaeol-ogist. The Club reporter; because he likes it and knows short-hand. [He is seldom recorded as reading anything to the Club, and it is then not reported; but he appears to have written several novels.]

ALWIN ARUNDEL LOWDHAM. B.N.C. Born 1938. Lecturer in English Language. Chiefly interested in Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and Comparative Philology. Occasionally writes comic or satirical verse. [Known as Arry.]

PHILIP FRANKLEY. Queen's. Born 1932. A poet, once well-known as a leader of the Queer Metre movement; but now just a poet, still publishing volumes of collected verse; suffers from horror borealis (as he calls it) and is intolerant of all things Northern or Germanic. [He is, all the same, a close friend of Lowdham.]

WILFRID TREWIN JEREMY. Corpus Christi. Born 1942.

University Lecturer in English Literature. He specializes in Escapism, and has written books on the history and criticism of Ghost-stories, Time-travel, and Imaginary Lands.

James Jones. Born 1927. Has been a schoolmaster, journalist, and playwright. Is now retired, living in Oxford, and divides his time between producing plays and his hobby of private printing.

A very silent man, but assists the Reporter with his retentive memory.

Dr. Abel Pitt. Trinity. Born 1928. Formerly Chaplain of Trinity College; now Bishop of Buckingham. Scholar, occasional poet.

Colombo Arditi. St. John's. Born 1940. Tempestosa Professor of Italian. Is fond of (and not unskilled in) singing (basso), swimming, and the game of bowls. Collects books and cats.

Dom Jonathan Markison, O.S.B.(2) New College, Master of St.

Cuthbert's Hall. [Polymath.]

Sir Gerard Manface. All Souls. Lawyer. Mountaineer; much travelled. Has many children, for whom he wrote many (unpublished) books and tales. [Seldom appears. A special friend of Frankley, but not resident in Oxford.]

Ranulph Stainer. University College. Born 1936. Profes-sionally an expert in banking and economics; privately devoted to the history and practice of music, and has composed several works, major and minor, including one (moderately successful) opera: Midas.