heading off to auction (and a sad story)

All packed up and ready to go - someone from Bonham's picked up this flat packet this morning.  Inside, two letters from J.R.R. Tolkien.

A couple of months back, clearing through a filing cabinet, I discovered a little cache of my mother's things, including these two letters, which she'd kept - out of reverence? Knowing my mother, out of some sense of awed proximity to the Oxford Famous.  But if I'd been her, I'd have torn them into little bits and burned them.  For Tokien was, towards her, when she was a graduate student in the late 40s, a rather unhelpful Senior Figure on the English Faculty.  To be sure, his area of work wasn't hers - whatever hers was, and he was positioned to help her sort that out.  But he was on the doctoral qualifying committee that failed her - both because she had been allowed in the first place to propose a preposterously broad topic - "The Rose in English Literature" - and then because she, shy at the best of times, wasn't able to utter a word in the exam itself.  At least, that's the story she told.  It seems that she then looked to him for some advice, which was far from forthcoming.

What I hadn't realised until after her death is that she had subsequently enrolled for the MLitt - a lesser graduate degree than the DPhil - and wrote a perfectly competent thesis on Shakespearean sonnets.  There was a copy, buried deep in a cupboard.  The very fact of her writing it seemed to come as news to my father.  I had to find out what happened by following this up with St Anne's, her (and my) college.  It looks as though she submitted - but again failed.  Was she again mute? 

This goes a long way to explain her ambivalence towards my career, of course.  And it also explains why I feel so absolutely dreadful, for days, if I'm ever on a qualifying committee that ends up not passing someone.  But what I've known of her story has left me with a lifelong loathing of that Inklings group - Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Hugo Dyson (I met him: he fiddled endlessly with pieces of string), Charles Williams and the rest.  The tone of these letters epitomizes their supercilious paternalism.  

I didn't ever get past three pages of The Lord of the Rings, though I liked The Hobbit well enough when I was six.  Even if I had adored them, I don't think I'd have been comfortable keeping these specimens of the Oxford male arrogance that undermined my mother's confidence - and, worse still, the authority of which she internalized.  So - these may not be destined to fetch very much money (the thought of any little epistles from a supervisor fetching anything is of course decidedly improbable).  But off they go ... I am so glad to see the back of such bad karma.