"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

an excellent judge of song.

The List of Members.

At the top of a page that preceded the manuscript A and is almost
certainly the first setting down of the opening passage of Night 60 of ',
the Papers (see p. 211, note 7) my father wrote these names:
Ramer Latimer Franks Loudham Dolbear
Beneath Ramer he wrote 'Self', but struck it out, then 'CSL' and 'To',
these also being struck out. Beneath Latimer he wrote 'T', beneath
Franks 'CSL', beneath Loudham 'HVD' (Hugo Dyson), and beneath
Dolbear 'Havard'.
This is the only actual identification of members of the Notion Club
with members of the Inklings that is found. The name Latimer (for
Guildford) remained that of the Club's 'reporter' in manuscript A; it is
derived from Old French latinier ('Latiner', speaker of Latin), meaning
an interpreter. Loudham (so spelt in A and B, and initially in the
manuscript E of Part Two) would obviously be Dyson even without
'HVD' written beneath (see Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, pp.
212 - 13); and since Franks (only becoming Frankley in the third text
C) is here Lewis, I suppose that my father felt that the name was
appropriate to his character. The other two names were presumably
'significant', but I do not know what the significance was. Dolbear is
an uncommon surname, but there was a chemist's shop in Oxford
called Dolbear & Goodall, and I recollect that my father found this
particularly engaging; it may be that he simply found in Dolbear the
chemist a comic appropriateness to Havard, or to Havard as he was
going to present him. Ramer is very puzzling; and here there is no
certain identification with one of the Inklings in the list. The various
dictionaries of English surnames that I have consulted do not give the
name. The only suggestion that I can make is that my father derived it
from the dialectal verb rame, with these meanings given in the Oxford
English Dictionary: 'to shout, cry aloud, scream; keep up the same
cry, continue repeating the same thing; obtain by persistent asking;
repeat, run over'; cf. also the English Dialect Dictionary, ed. Joseph
Wright (with which he was very familiar: he called it 'indispensable',
Letters no. 6), ream verb 3, also raim, rame, etc., which gives similar
meanings, and also 'to talk nonsense, rave'. But this seems far-fetched.
At any rate, this list is interesting as suggesting that my father
started out with the idea of a series of definite 'equivalences', distorted
no doubt but recognisable. But I think that this plan very quickly
dissolved, because he found that it would not suit his purpose; and not



even in the earliest text does there seem to be any clearer association
with individual Inklings than there is in the final form of the Papers,
with the possible exception of Lowdham. In A his interventions are
limited to jocular facetiousness, and the interest that in the later form
of part One (pp. 199 - 201) he shows in 'Old Solar' and in Ramer's names