[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

One of these days I may have to write a serious and considered response to Michael Moorcock, but today is not that day. Instead I shall offer my immediate reactions on this re-reading of Epic Pooh.

First and foremost, what is most evident throughout this essay is that Moorcock has a gigantic chip on his shoulder about that ill-defined socialist bugbear, the English middle class. Most of his opinions about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien particularly seem mere tributaries to a deep dislike and mistrust of a stereotyped bourgeoisie, with whom he identifies them. To which social class Moorcock believes himself to belong I'm not entirely sure, since I very much doubt that he wishes to identify himself with the aristocracy, and his concerns don't look very working class to me. Then again, perhaps he thinks, as so many champagne socialists do, that an expressed virulent dislike for the middle class places one outside the system.

Given this obvious dislike of self-satisfied suburbanism, it seems interesting to me that he has neglected to examine The Hobbit, in which the hero is forced to shake off his pompous bourgeois lethargy and actually do something useful. Perhaps this is more than an accident. Moorcock quotes two passages from The Lord of the Rings as proof of his opinions about Tolkien's entire body of work, both fairly minor and unimportant passages. He seems completely blind, however, to the social commentary of the scene in The Ivy Bush. Such small concerns are the daily fare of village gossip; as are the dogmatic moral judgements and idle speculation that appear from a number of characters in that scene. Tolkien lived before tabloid journalism became the norm, but he would have recognised how such reporting fills the exact void in people's lives left by the dissolution of community: the need to know about and pass judgement upon one's neighbours. Tolkien punctures a number of bourgeois balloons in the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings and the self-importance of gossipping busybodies is one of them. Given this reading, I find it difficult to see how it lulls one. I suppose if one were to sit back, secure in one's intellectual superiority, and think "look at the stupid rustics", one could easily see this as a rather patronising laugh at the expense of the rural working class; but the irony is that to understand the passage in that way one would first have to hold just such an opinion. It amuses me to think that much middle-class socialism is based on just such opinions.

That, I suppose, is the real flaw in Moorcock's analysis. However much he may rail against Thatcherism (how Tolkien is an apologist for that I'm not entirely sure, since he was dead before the movement began), he is himself very much what one might call 'new bourgeois': a group which reads The Guardian and The Independent and thinks itself very progressive because it buys a copy of The Big Issue once in a while, donates to Oxfam and wishes that Thatcher had never been Prime Minister. What gives Moorcock away is the following passage.

That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.

To my mind, the association of all popular culture with moral and intellectual degeneracy is one of the most bourgeois and reactionary stances there is. 'Our free-falling academic standards' have been a staple of middle-class complaint, probably ever since Britons first began to educate one another. The following passage contains another very bourgeois and very British assumption:

...as Britain declines, dreaming of a sweeter past, entertaining few hopes for a finer future, her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals, the safety of the woods that are the pattern of the paper on the nursery room wall.

I've said elsewhere that the idea of a declining world and nostalgia for vanished glories is a strong element in the earliest English literature that survives. For the writer of The Ruin this was inspired the great architectural works of a vanished people (the Romans, although they are never named as such); the author of The Wanderer asks in a series of rhetorical flourishes what happened to the heroes and glories he remembers; Beowulf is full of intimations of coming disaster, looking back to a world of lost heroes and a greatness long since fallen. My point is that English people, like all people to some extent, are inclined to think that the present is in constant decline and the future is uncertain. There is nothing new or world-shattering about thinking this, nor is it any more accurate than it was in Augustan Rome or pre-conquest England. The real amusement lies in Moorcock's simultaneous belief that Victorian and Georgian political values are morally bankrupt, so that we are to believe at one and the same time that the world is in decline and that we are morally and intellectually superior to past generations. How this manages to be true I cannot imagine; at least Tolkien decided to plant his feet firmly in the continuing decay camp and thus avoided the contradiction.

That may seem a lot like a political tirade, but I feel justified in spending time on the politics of that article rather than Tolkien's fiction, because the article was itself more about politics and class struggle than about literature. There is actually little difference between some of the passages that Moorcock dislikes and others of which he approves. The distinction lies in what Moorcock thinks the authors stand for, and for him Tolkien stands for stodgy Victorian bourgeois little-Englanders. What I think Tolkien actually stood for politically was non-Socialism, and not even on ideological grounds, but because he disliked large bureaucracies interfering in the lives of ordinary people. That Tolkien fails to question "white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us" is only true because we never find out about Sauron's clothing, and Saruman spends a lot of his time wearing white or many colours. As for the world outside the Shire being dangerous, isn't it always dangerous to step outside one's own society? Tolkien himself believed that Hobbits needed to step into the dangerous world outside the Shire to attain their true potential. In that regard he promotes the idea that we should venture out into the wider world, that we should accept the dangers and the opportunities that such a step presents. Aside from anything else, an adventure set in the Shire of the early chapters of LotR would be crushingly dull, and Tolkien knew that. If anything he is saying that the dangerous outside world is more desirable, grander and more heroic than the well-ordered and well-tilled countryside that he invented for his diminutive heroes. Only by stepping into this world can they grow enough to save their own from the malicious vandalism and industrial tyranny of Saruman. All in all, once again Tolkien is more complicated and less devoted to the establishment than one of his detractors thinks.

I find the association of Sauron and the Orcs with the working class extremely difficult to understand. Sauron and his Orcs are united, and often divided, in wickedness, but at completely different levels of the social scale, like the baronet Sir Oswald Mosley and his black-shirted footsoldiers. Surely someone who says, as I do, that the British Union of Fascists was a morally reprehensible and very dangerous movement is not attacking the working class. Smaug in The Hobbit speaks in the drawling tones of an Old Etonian; the increasingly deluded Denethor is an aristocrat as well, but Lotho Sackville-Baggins, misguided corrupter of the Shire, is as deliberately middle-class as it is possible to be. Contrary to popular belief, double-barrelled surnames are decidedly non-U. Incidentally, I find that the motto on a plaque in Tower Hamlets commemorating the Battle of Cable Street is They shall not pass.

In short, Michael Moorcock is attacking his own social group, from which he means to disassociate himself because he would rather be working class. That this is another trait of the English middle class which can be seen in his article only reinforces the fact that Moorcock is what he is attacking. What he means to attack is the incarnation of the English middle class represented by Tolkien's generation, which Tolkien enjoyed gently pricking when he wrote social comedy. The real objection, of which Moorcock may or may not be aware, is to Tolkien's constant attacks on the shibboleths of socialism: advancement through scientific progress, social engineering and organisation, and the idea that those in charge know what is best for us. Tolkien's is a dissenting voice that doesn't even really attack socialism, but rather some of its outcomes and ideas. Some of his points have been borne out by successive socialist governments in Britain, and that no doubt further irritates those who dislike his politics. What always seems to go over their heads, though, is that Tolkien disapproved of political posturing in general. Both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit feature large, public acclamations of leaders who have shown real leadership and personal worth. It was this desire for trustworthy and honest leaders, uncorrupted by political considerations, that lay behind his taste for either anarchy or absolute monarchy. Tolkien did not trust the men in grey at all apart from Gandalf, who isn't technically a man.

Of course, the problem for some members of Moorcock's generation is that they define themselves as rebels against the establishment, but have themselves become the establishment. Everyone does, of course; it's one of the indignities of age, but sometimes it gives rise to a need to rebel against the old order, with which Moorcock identifies Tolkien and Lewis. Their comfortable Edwardianism was what the youth of the 1960s wanted to overthrow, and now that's been done all that's left to rebel against are Moorcock's contemporaries and the ideas of Victorian Britain, particularly its middle class. I find it particularly sad that he blames the Thatcherism he so hated on the attitudes of Tolkien's generation, when it can be seen more as a reaction against the complete disarray that had arisen under the previous Labour government. Perhaps that is too hard a thought to accept: that Britain in the 1970s swung violently between left and right wing political mismanagement. For him the left is always on the side of the angels.

In any case, it's rather sad to see someone fighting political battles by attacking someone like Tolkien, whose books concern themselves with more universal ethical concerns. No political system can survive unless it knows how people should be treated, and Tolkien's idea seems to be that people should and must take responsibility for themselves and their neighbours, keep their promises and choose their leaders with care. That is not a politically biased position, although the partisan on either side of the spectrum might think it to be an attack on them. I note that Moorcock now lives in that well-known left-wing utopia, Texas, where surely the business-driven politics of 1980s Conservatives have never held sway.

The final point is this. Of those who attack Tolkien, nearly everyone seems to have an axe to grind, and it's normally political. People like Philip Pullman appear to dislike the fact that Tolkien has no specific message to peddle, whereas others like Moorcock prefer to associate him with political or social ideas that they find reprehensible. Of course there are others who simply argue that his works are meaningless drivel, but even they support a particular literary style that is widely at variance with Tolkien's. All of them are basically saying that their opinion, their social conscience or literary judgement is superior to that of the unwashed rabble of Tolkien fans, who wouldn't know decent literature (like Moorcock's or Pullman's) if it jumped up and gave them a haircut. Personally I found His Dark Materials declined as its message became clearer, and the one novel of Moorcock's that I've ever read struck me as no more than a decent enough read. Unlike them, however, I don't assume that this makes their writing either reactionary garbage or lightweight nonsense. It seems to me that the people who most dislike Tolkien are the people who are least able to leave their real-world hang-ups at the door. They dislike him because they dislike LotR, and they dislike that because they were never prepared to accept the fictional world on its own terms. That's where W.H. Auden's observation arises, although even that was inaccurate: I've met people who are quite indifferent to LotR; an opinion that I respect as honest and concerned with literary appreciation. I also respect the recorded dislike of the Times literary editor, because she is merely expressing an honest opinion, not pushing some other agenda through an ostensible literary critique. Perhaps I'm stuck in a perpetual childhood, but growing up is severely overrated if it means judging everything by where it appears to stand on the political spectrum rather than whether or not I like it.