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11.
Брэдли Бирцер пишет в J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth -
Tolkien knew little, if any, of Lewis's internal struggles regarding
a possible move to the Roman Catholic Church, and his most scath-
ing attack on Lewis, "The Ulsterior Motive," remains unpublished
and unavailable to the general or academic public. Tolkien wrote it
within a year of Lewis's death in 1963. He nominally wrote it as a
response to Lewis's posthumous Letters to Malcolm, a work Tolkien
considered "distressing and in parts horrifying."48 Only a few people have read the entire manuscript , and from the few available glimpses of it, "The Ulsterior Motive" seems to digress into a serious analysis of Tolkien and Lewis's friendship. In it, for example, Tolkien remembers a conversation with Lewis in which Tolkien noted that St. John served as his patron saint. "Lewis stiffened," Tolkien wrote.
[H]is head went back, and he said in the brusque harsh tones which
I was later to hear him use again when dismissing something he
disapproved of: 'I can't imagine any two persons more dissimilar.'
We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby
little Catholic caught by the eye of an 'Evangelical clergyman of
good family' taking holy water at the door of a church.49
Lewis's personality was such that he most likely forgot this comment
a moment after making it.50 Like his character Treebeard, though,
Tolkien forgot very little, and Lewis's dig remained strong in his
memory for several decades. Tolkien further argues in "The Ulsterior
Motive" that Lewis was "keen-witted rather than clear-sighted."51 In
the margins of his own copy of Letters to Malcolm, Tolkien wrote
that far more than being about prayer, the book was really about
how Lewis prayed. It was according to Tolkien autobiographical, which
he thought was the case with all of Lewis's works.52 On the whole,
"The Ulsterior Motive" provides strong evidence that Tolkien, one
of the two men most instrumental in Lewis's conversion to Chris-
tianity, resented that Lewis never became Roman Catholic but in-
stead re-awoke to "the prejudices so sedulously planted in childhood
and boyhood."53
Написано, что этот текст недоступен ни для публичного, ни для академического доступа. :(
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