Biography,  Literary Study

The Fellowship

511ximwLEgLWhat then, were the Inklings? Was John Wain right to call them (as we reported on the first page of this study) ‘a circle of instigators, almost of incendiaries, meeting to urge one another on in the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life’? Were they, rather, just a circle of friends, sharing talk, drink, jokes, and writings? Something in between or something other? The question vexed the Inklings themselves, their supporters, and their detractors during the group’s existence and after its demise.

Philip and Carol Zaleski ask this question at the start of the final chapter of their thoroughgoing study of four of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. While much of the material about Lewis and Tolkien was already familiar to me, I gained an introduction to Charles Williams (of whom I’ve read a little) and Owen Barfield (of whom I knew nothing at all), and in these pages we also meet several others who belonged to the Inklings’ circle.

My answer to the Zaleskis’ question would be that the Inklings were a circle of literary friends, firing on all cylinders and modeling Christian friendship at its best — thus inspiring one another and spurring one another on in their creative purposes and talents. What I value most about this balanced and well-researched book (“a tome,” the librarian commented when I checked it out of the library) is its depiction of friendships that rise and fall, grow and recede, and mature among the rhythms of life for this group of scholars. The mental picture that might spring to mind when one hears “the Inklings” is of a group of well-educated, brilliant artists having intense literary discussions in a British pub. But there was much more to their lives: families, illnesses, misunderstandings and conflicts and reconciliations, wars, long walks, and many changing seasons in their relations one to another. Ultimately in this book we get a developed portrait of mature friendship — not without its difficulties, but immensely rewarding and life-changing.

Lewis emerges as the central figure of the group, not only for his vast literary output but for his gift of friendship. He was an extremely social person, quick to value people of all kinds and draw them into a constellation organized around his gravitational force. Tolkien, a less genial and more exacting personality, would surely never have finished his “legendarium” (which he worked on steadily for many decades) without Lewis’s encouragement. (When asked near the end of his life about their relationship, Lewis explained, “I don’t think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn’t influence him. That is, didn’t influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v. much to write at all with that gravity and at that length. In other words I acted as a midwife not as a father.”) Owen Barfield, noted for his writings on Rudolph Steiner and anthroposophism, seems to have found his debates with Lewis in the days before Lewis converted to Christianity as the spring from which the major currents of his intellectual life flowed. Charles Williams joined the Inklings at Lewis’s invitation, and though he died young and left a legacy of anything but unanimous acclaim, Lewis never ceased to honor him and look for ways to bring his work before a wider audience. The Inklings met regularly on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child pub, and on Thursday nights in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen, and Lewis and his brother Warren were its most faithful members — the only two attendants at the last Thursday night meeting. The impression of Lewis as someone whose enormous influence grows as much from his deeply social orientation and love for people as from his intellectual energy is one of my strongest impressions from The Fellowship.

I found new details of Tolkien’s life and writing here, and though it was absorbing reading it didn’t change my impression of him as a brilliant, somewhat prickly perfectionist. A devoted Roman Catholic, his role in C.S. Lewis’s conversion is central, but after that it seems the two were more at odds than not in their Christianity; Tolkien strongly disapproved of Lewis’s theological writings, which arguably brought him before his widest audience, and Lewis was critical of Roman Catholicism. Tolkien also disliked Lewis’s use of figures from classical mythology in the Narnia books. His feelings toward Lewis seem a complex mixture of deep loyalty and love (he described Lewis’s death as an “axe-blow near the roots”), and irritation (in a letter to his son he referred to Lewis’s “ponderous silliness”). Their friendship ebbed and flowed over the years, but it lasted; one of the central accomplishments of The Fellowship is its depiction of relationships growing, accommodating and maturing. I could relate to many of Tolkien’s attitudes and his strong responses — for instance, to the onslaught of the machine and to some aspects of modernity. His core world seems to have been made up of Catholicism, family, and his legendarium.

I’ve read a few novels by Charles Williams, and they were “stretching experiences”: The Place of the Lion and Descent into Hell. They stretched my imagination and introduced totally new ways of seeing my faith. This seems to have been his effect on others and his main gift. The literary value of his contributions is debatable, but as a personality he was an unforgettable force to those who knew him. I found him hard to get my mind around as I read The Fellowship; he seemed to me fundamentally odd with his simultaneous passions for Christianity, the occult, magic, and idealized romantic love. But his influence on others in the literary world of his day is undisputed.

About Barfield, I knew nothing at all until The Fellowship. In some ways I find him the most inspiring figure, for after an early start as an academic, he took a job in a law office and plugged away at it for 30 years supporting his family and feeling its stifling effects. Late in life, he dove back into writing and produced among other things an important book about Coleridge. In the last few decades of his life he became a well-known literary figure in America for his views on language, anthroposophism, and the evolution of consciousness. His conversations as a young man with the pre-Christian C.S. Lewis were important in his refinement of his own ideas, and he was deeply hurt by Lewis’s refusal to continue their debates (dubbed “The Great War”) after he became a Christian. He comes across as strangely preoccupied with Lewis all his life, almost what a later generation would call codependent. But he certainly came into his own.

Having written so much already, I have to concede that there is no way to fully represent all the ground covered in The Fellowship. There are themes here I haven’t even mentioned: the literary influence of the Inklings in contrast to the Bloomsbury Circle, the hostility toward Lewis for his Christian views, the effects of war on the Inklings. We may  think of these men as protected gentlemen in flannel and tweed, yet several of them served in battle and then returned to academic life. This typifies what I enjoyed most about The Fellowship: the Zaleskis give us a sense of these literary figures as minds and as men in the fuller contexts of their world over a lifetime. Part biography and part critical study, this would be an ambitious project to undertake for a single figure, but Philip and Carol Zaleski have undertaken it for four whose lives and influences are interwoven. This is why The Fellowship leaves me thinking about friendship, history, the nature of genius and influence, creativity, and love. This is a book well worth reading and savoring.

 

4 Comments

  • Barbara H.

    I had known little abut the Inklings except that they were a group of literary friends including Lewis and Tolkien until I read Alan Jacobs The Narnian earlier this year (a book I gained from but did not like in many respects). It was sad to learn that Lewis and Tolkien were at odds in some ways, but then again, the closest friendships are, I think, probe to that because close friends know each other better than others. Williams was a conundrum with such opposing interests. Looks like a book worth delving into some time.

    • Janet

      Hmm. I’m wondering what you disliked about The Narnian, which I really enjoyed! Feel free to leave a link to your review — I’d love to read it.

  • ~ linda

    OH, this sounds like a great book! I love to read those behind the scenes kind of stories…what made things happen and how people ticked. This sounds like a book right up my alley. Thanks for a great review of a book I may have never found on my own.