"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

PART TWO.

THE NOTION CLUB
PAPERS.

THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS.

Introduction.

On 18 December 1944, when The Lord of the Rings had reached the
end of what would become The Two Towers (and a few pages had
been written of 'Minas Tirith' and 'The Muster of Rohan' at the
beginning of Book V), my father wrote to me (Letters no. 92) that he
had seen C. S. Lewis that day: 'His fourth (or fifth?) novel is brewing,
and seems likely to clash with mine (my dimly projected third). I have
been getting a lot of new ideas about Prehistory lately (via Beowulf
and other sources of which I may have written) and want to work
them into the long shelved time-travel story I began. C. S. L. is
planning a story about the descendants of Seth and Cain.' His words
are tantalizingly difficult to interpret; but by 'clash with mine' he
surely meant that the themes of their books ran rather close.(1)
Whatever lies behind this, it is seen that he was at this time turning
his thoughts to a renewed attempt on the 'time-travel story', which
would issue a year later in The Notion Club Papers. In his letter to
Stanley Unwin of 21 July 1946 (Letters no. 105) he said that he hoped
very shortly 'actually to - write', to turn again to The Lord of the
Rings where he had left it, more than a year and a half before: 'I shall
now have to study my own work in order to get back to it,' he wrote.
But later in that same letter he said:

I have in a fortnight of comparative leisure round about last
Christmas written three parts of another book, taking up in an
entirely different frame and setting what little had any value in the
inchoate Lost Road (which I had once the impudence to show you: I
hope it is forgotten), and other things beside. I hoped to finish this in
a rush, but my health gave way after Christmas. Rather silly to
mention it, till it is finished. But I am putting The Lord of the Rings,
the Hobbit sequel, before all else, save duties that I cannot wriggle
out of.

So far as I have been able to discover there is no other reference to The
Notion Club Papers anywhere in my father's writings.

But the quantity of writing constituting The Notion Club Papers,
and the quantity of writing associated with them, cannot by any
manner of means have been the work of a fortnight. To substantiate
this, and since this is a convenient place to give this very necessary
information, I set out here the essential facts of the textual relations of
all this material, together with some brief indication of their content.