The Art of Manliness - #178： C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, and the Inklings

00:00:00.000 we're at mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast if

00:00:18.140 you're a tolkien fan you know lord of the rings hobbit or you're a c.s lewis fan you probably

00:00:22.100 have heard of the inklings if you haven't heard of the inklings you're in for a treat

00:00:26.020 this was a literary group that both tolkien and lewis belonged to for over three decades at

00:00:30.980 oxford where they got together one night a week to discuss and critique each other's work but as

00:00:36.920 well as talk about philosophy religion myths etc etc while smoking pipes and drinking adult beverages

00:00:43.800 it was like a like a little men's group it was only men all men anyways my guests stay on the

00:00:49.180 podcast have written a biography of this group it's called the fellowship the literary lies of

00:00:54.760 the inklings their names are philip and carol zaleski they're a married couple and today on

00:00:59.500 the show we're going to discuss the members of the inklings tolkien lewis also some of the more

00:01:04.480 lesser known but who individuals but also who had a profound impact on american literature

00:01:08.780 in other ways owen barfield and charles williams and we'll also discuss the lasting impact of the

00:01:14.860 inklings on a religion in the west as well as literature in the west great discussion

00:01:20.660 uh so without further ado philip and carol zaleski

00:01:23.660 philip and carol zaleski welcome to the show thank you thank you brett uh so you two are a

00:01:37.340 husband-wife team wrote a book about the inklings now i know a lot of our listeners know who the

00:01:44.060 inklings are have heard of them and are big fans of two of the members but for those who aren't

00:01:48.840 familiar can you tell us who what were the inklings and who belonged to this little group

00:01:52.680 you want to dive in carol or okay yeah we're in different rooms so we can't signal to each other

00:01:59.360 but i'd be happy to start out on that um so the inklings was that was a literary club

00:02:04.660 um a fellowship this is how we like to think of it um which is perhaps a little runs a little deeper

00:02:11.480 than the affiliations you might have in a club and um it was founded um actually uh not by uh

00:02:19.800 tolkien and lewis themselves but by an undergraduate named edward tangy lean uh brother of the filmmaker

00:02:26.520 david lean at oxford um but tolkien and lewis and a few other uh like-minded friends had been

00:02:33.740 gathering since the late 1920s for literary conversation they took over uh from the group

00:02:42.160 called the inklings that was founded by edward tangy lean in uh late in 1933 and they used to

00:02:48.380 meet in uh c.s lewis's rooms in maudlin college on thursday evenings to read their works in progress

00:02:56.280 to each other and then socially they would meet in various pubs on tuesday mornings most likely

00:03:02.060 um and that went on until lewis died and on the same day as jfk in 1963 so it was about 30 years

00:03:09.440 of gatherings um with a variety of people joining right so it was a literary group yeah c.s lewis

00:03:17.860 jr tolkien everyone knows who a lot of people know who they are i've seen lord of the rings you guys

00:03:22.080 know who is um but you started off the book talking about um sort of the atmosphere at oxford i thought

00:03:29.960 this was really interesting i didn't know much about this but there was this real culture of

00:03:35.140 club creation like there was it seemed like there was a club for almost anything and everything

00:03:39.800 at oxford at the time and the members of the inklings belonged to other clubs not just the

00:03:46.300 inklings um so can you tell us a little bit about this um culture of creating clubs and what kind of

00:03:51.920 clubs people could find at oxford during the early part of the 20th century yeah well as you say

00:03:57.760 the the clubs were innumerable and both uh tolkien and lewis were avid members of these of many clubs

00:04:06.100 uh i think i'd start by pointing out that uh this goes back to tolkien's teenage years

00:04:12.400 when he formed a club called the tea club and barovian society uh devoted uh to uh he and his friends

00:04:21.340 uh so three or four close friends had decided to join this form this club uh to uh bring goodness and

00:04:29.620 honesty and virtue and purity to western civilization so tolkien at a very early age was club oriented

00:04:36.580 um lewis dove in when he uh when he went to oxford uh clubs as they belong to included um

00:04:47.120 uh lewis belonged to an english faculty club called the cave uh tolkien belonged to uh

00:04:55.060 oh gee i wonder if i can remember the name something called the checkers club i think

00:05:00.700 right um the essay club that one yeah yeah uh he joined the debating society a club called the

00:05:09.120 dialectical society so there were all sorts of clubs uh eventually he and tolkien when uh when they

00:05:16.780 first became friends uh formed a club called the cold biters uh which literally means uh men biting

00:05:26.440 coal and it's a reference to um ancient icelandic bards and this was a society devoted to norse

00:05:34.020 um mythology and norse literature and then it all blossomed in the in queens itself um and while they

00:05:43.500 were writing the great works they also belonged to other clubs i think just just to underscore what

00:05:49.460 phil was saying about the um the ubiquity of clubs that oxford there's also a long tradition of that

00:05:57.020 just in english culture and we talked about that in the book that there were forerunners

00:06:01.540 to these clubs um there's a club that um called the friday street club that ben johnson and john

00:06:10.160 don belonged to keats even dedicated a poem to it and there was the scribblerus club that had

00:06:17.200 jonathan swift and alexander pope and we really were drawn to the club which was founded by samuel

00:06:23.880 johnson and the painter sir joshua reynolds and had an amazing group of men edmund burke was in it

00:06:29.480 adam adam smith um asiatic jones um and it was similar in many ways to the inklings that is

00:06:38.600 there's no platform for the club it's just a place to go and hang out with like-minded people

00:06:44.780 all right so i mean it sounds like the inklings was a legacy of enlightenment because the way you

00:06:50.300 described it it sounded very much like uh you know benjamin franklin starting the mutual improvement

00:06:55.900 society

00:06:56.440 and in fact uh c.s lewis is often compared to samuel johnson who is the great enlightenment figure in uh

00:07:06.880 in english history okay and is this does this uh club culture still exist at oxford you know i looked

00:07:14.640 at the uh oxford university website um there's a long long list of clubs and societies um and debating

00:07:22.780 groups which have official sanction but in that respect they're not private clubs um i think that

00:07:29.880 the the era of the private men's club is faded i think maybe because it may seem to some people

00:07:37.460 elitist or exclusive or that a kind of multicultural and co-ed environment um seems to make it look

00:07:47.800 like a thing of the past i'm not sure that i mean i don't think it's entirely a thing of the past but

00:07:52.900 i think that makes inroads into club culture right and that was interesting too by the inklings they had

00:07:57.120 a very strict no women rule i think that's almost unstated it's just an assumption um that that you

00:08:05.100 would that these would be sex segregated clubs um there was you know stories to circulate about

00:08:11.640 dorothy l sayers trying to get into the club and banging on the door and not being let in but that's 1.00

00:08:17.100 that's apocryphal so i know most people who are listening are probably familiar with um c.s lewis

00:08:23.440 and tolkien but there's two other members of the inklings that you highlight and go into deep great

00:08:28.920 detail about the biography owen barfield and charles williams and honestly before i read but can you

00:08:36.060 tell us a little bit about their what they did their their influence on i guess english literature or

00:08:42.780 academics at oxford well sure uh i'd say william charles williams is uh by far the better better known of

00:08:52.020 the two because he was a novelist um who published um uh quite a number of uh what people refer to as

00:09:01.580 supernatural shockers these are uh thrillers uh or mystery novels or uh would then always involve

00:09:09.120 supernatural events uh they were quite popular at the time and they're still popular there are many

00:09:15.220 avid uh williams fans uh around these days uh williams was a uh uh in a way a self-taught man uh he uh

00:09:27.220 he worked at oxford university press most of his adult life uh became a well-known editor there

00:09:34.740 and befriended lewis and then the other uh inklings um in addition to his uh his spiritual shockers

00:09:44.400 he uh wrote some marvelous books on dante and on anglican history and on poetry he considered

00:09:52.800 himself a poet first and foremost uh barfield is a more obscure figure uh he uh was a specialist in

00:10:02.520 the history of language uh in the history of words and how words change over the centuries and he had

00:10:10.540 this really brilliant idea which amounts to the reverse engineering of words where you track the

00:10:17.220 history of words back in time until you get to their primordial meaning um and through this he thought he

00:10:25.100 could trace the history of human consciousness as well uh so as you can imagine his books are a little

00:10:31.380 more abstruse uh obscure and uh even a cult than uh than williams are uh but he also has a somewhat of a

00:10:42.680 following um some very important people uh saul bellow the nobel prize winner most notably have been

00:10:51.800 students of his or disciples of his uh so these are the two most prominent inklings apart from lewis and

00:11:00.300 talking and that's why we chose to focus on them as well uh yeah yeah and uh i guess barfield i thought

00:11:08.760 it was interesting like he seemed like his entire life he was sort of uh i don't know envious maybe

00:11:14.020 but a little envious of the success it wasn't later on it wasn't until later on in life that he actually

00:11:18.400 had some renown and some success he experienced that yeah it makes it makes for a beautiful story in a

00:11:24.180 way because uh um it's a great tale of someone who is in the shadows for most of his life barfield

00:11:32.320 uh didn't have great skills as a fiction writer couldn't make a living as a writer um you can hardly

00:11:40.560 make a living as a writer of a historian of uh language so he uh went into the law and while tolkien and lewis

00:11:50.120 and many of the other inklings were basking in public acclaim uh poor barfield was toiling away in his

00:11:57.400 london law office you know dealing with um real estate matters and torts and so on uh but

00:12:05.060 eventually in the 1960s people started reading his books uh mostly at first because he was known as c.s

00:12:15.360 lewis's best friend uh and what he came to america barfield did and started uh giving lecture tours

00:12:23.380 around america and teaching at american universities and uh these were smash success both above the

00:12:30.540 teaching and the lecture tours and people then started reading barfield's own books and they

00:12:36.920 discovered that in addition to being lewis's great friend barfield himself had very intriguing ideas to

00:12:43.860 offer uh and ideas that fit in rather well with the um tenor of the 1960s and 1970s uh because he was an

00:12:54.900 esoteric thinker he was interested in an alternative uh descriptions of of uh history he rejected darwinism

00:13:03.360 for example um he uh he was a follower of a of a german um spiritual teacher named rudolf steiner

00:13:12.100 uh so barfield came into his own just when the other inklings were dying out and in fact he lived

00:13:20.440 to be 99 years old so he had a chance to savor his his late triumph yeah it was great to see like

00:13:28.220 it kind of worked out for him in the end yeah um i'm curious you mentioned that there were other

00:13:33.340 members of the group like these are the four most prominent uh lewis talking barfield and williams but

00:13:38.260 it seemed like also the the membership of the include was very uh there was the uh the critic

00:13:43.320 and biographer uh lord david sisal um an immensely attractive figure an important man of letters

00:13:50.140 uh who also had ties to the bloomsbury group which had a very different literary and and uh cultural

00:13:57.100 mindset um but he was that sort of a generous mind that he could live in both worlds there was an

00:14:03.900 important chaucer scholar and theater and film director neville coghill who um actually gave

00:14:09.960 richard burton and elizabeth taylor their start in oxford theatrics um and there was a dominican

00:14:16.700 named gervais matthew scholar and an english don named hugo dyson very rambunctious fellow

00:14:23.360 um there was also um lewis's brother warny um who uh presided at inklings meetings poured the drinks

00:14:31.840 um actually he himself struggled with alcoholism but he was a very kind man and uh he also wrote

00:14:38.180 he wrote histories of 17th century france and then there were and then a young member was john wayne

00:14:43.640 who uh later became known as one of the group called the angry young men

00:14:47.760 yeah and also tolkien's son joined as well and tolkien's son right yeah who's who's still alive and is

00:14:55.660 the last living in clean i'm curious so they had all these members that would come and join but

00:15:00.720 there seemed like these four were like the core i'm curious like what brought these what drew these

00:15:06.000 men together because it seems like they come from very different backgrounds right you have

00:15:09.360 polkine the catholic with lewis the atheist turned anglican you have barfield who was really into

00:15:16.600 esotericism and you had williams who was a poet i mean what was it that drew these men what was the

00:15:22.280 common bond between all of them well there are several common bonds first of one perhaps first and

00:15:28.180 most importantly they were all writers and not only writers but uh very active and productive

00:15:34.680 writers the inclined group really was a writing club they write each other's unpublished uh manuscripts

00:15:43.200 works in progress and then they severely criticized each other's works and this criticism uh uh improved

00:15:52.240 the works of all the works of all the members uh so that's something they had in common in addition they were all

00:15:58.580 christians uh lewis said explicitly to charles williams that being a christian was was a requirement for joining

00:16:05.200 the group um they were romantics pretty much to a man they loved language they loved stories uh they loved

00:16:16.380 fantasy which set them off from the uh you know the the accepted literary views of the day and um that's

00:16:28.760 something that united them they were united then in adversity as well as in comradeship

00:16:34.560 um i'm curious go ahead yeah also it had anti-modernism to that or uh not in a kind of not in a reactionary

00:16:44.120 anti-modernism but a desire to see the world re-enchanted through its connection to uh to

00:16:50.320 traditions and values of the past yeah that was really interesting particularly when you talk about

00:16:55.120 c.s lewis and his literature uh he wrote sci-fi a lot of people don't know that they forget that

00:17:01.840 you know it really was uh science fantasy more than science fiction um it was just um it was a way for

00:17:12.660 him to present mythological and spiritual ideas on uh on a broader canvas he set them on other planets

00:17:20.980 but um i don't think they would be considered anything like uh hardcore science fiction right but

00:17:28.200 yeah but is that that theme of like they're they were sort of anti-modern but they wanted to recapture

00:17:32.680 some of the essence of it yeah that's how we look at it isn't it's an effort at uh what we call

00:17:38.560 recovery rather than reaction so recovery really brings into the present um what is worth saving

00:17:47.020 from the past and what is still a still a living tradition so it's not a it's not antiquarianism and

00:17:53.680 it's not mere nostalgia but it's a sense that there's a real live tradition that perhaps we've

00:17:58.980 we're in a state of amnesia we've forgotten that it's there but it's still uh it's still viable for us

00:18:04.060 that's one thing what owen barfield helped with actually he he convinced lewis that the ideas of

00:18:10.060 the past um can be i guess evaluated on their own merits and uh that it's only chronological snobbery

00:18:17.520 that makes us think that ideas that were uh life-giving in the past are no longer available to us

00:18:24.980 great phil you alluded a little bit to the the dynamic it was a writing club they'd come to each

00:18:29.740 other they someone would read a work there was criticism do we know what a typical meeting was

00:18:34.720 like or like the dynamic in a meeting do we have records of that yeah we have diary diary entries

00:18:40.200 by uh mostly by lewis's brother warny lewis who uh near the end of his life uh lamented several times

00:18:49.500 that he hadn't kept careful notes i think he said if he realized that what he had had uh what he'd been

00:18:56.420 a part of he would have recorded every meeting in detail instead we just have um a brief accounts

00:19:04.500 of meetings but we have many of those and we know that uh meetings would start well these were evening

00:19:11.180 meetings for the most part at least the ones in lewis's digs of maudlin college which were the more

00:19:16.700 important meetings those are the ones in which literary work actually went on the tuesday morning

00:19:22.860 meetings were uh more just general socializing so they would they would all gather in the evenings

00:19:29.120 and uh warny would uh take coats and would settle uh members down with the drink and then uh c.s lewis

00:19:37.980 would ask if anyone had something to read and generally someone did and it would be read and then the

00:19:45.180 comments would start uh they also uh discussed ideas uh all manner of ideas so whether dogs go to

00:19:54.820 heaven uh the nature of hell um you know if i had warny's diaries in front of me i could tell you about

00:20:02.860 30 or 40 amusing things they they discussed uh there was uh a lot of friendship a lot of rivalry

00:20:12.360 a lot of caustic comments especially by hugo dyson uh who could be very funny but also could be very

00:20:20.000 nasty and has um reflections on other people's works and ideas uh but uh there was a lot of laughter

00:20:29.340 uh i think the the group lasted so long because people really enjoyed the meetings they enjoyed uh

00:20:38.280 laughing with each other telling stories uh drinking together just having a good time together

00:20:45.220 and so i mean when they did offer criticism like did they really go after the person uh with like

00:20:51.880 gloves off i mean i think nowadays when people have like reading like you know writers groups like

00:20:56.160 everyone's like everyone wants to be really polite but i imagine that's not what happened here

00:20:59.520 no they weren't really polite sometimes they could be well hugo dyson be quite vulgar but i'll refrain

00:21:06.300 from repeating what he said about uh tolkien's elves um tolkien uh for his part could be quite

00:21:12.600 critical of lewis because he felt that lewis was trying to write the kind of mythopaic um

00:21:18.960 imaginative literature that tolkien himself was dedicated to but that lewis was kind of slipshot about it

00:21:25.680 and didn't really work at building out a completely internally coherent um mythos when he was creating

00:21:33.080 imaginary worlds tolkien had very high standards about that no one ever before or ever since

00:21:39.640 tolkien has accomplished what he did in terms of uh internally consistent believable invented

00:21:45.460 mythologies so um so he would criticize lewis for that um but another thing they did for each other

00:21:52.100 though was encouragement i mean when in terms of outsiders they would circle the wagon so they could

00:21:56.860 be quite critical of one another but for instance when lewis um tried to get his first science fiction

00:22:04.020 fantasy novel published out of the silent planet um the reader's reports were pretty bad and the

00:22:10.060 publisher was pretty negative about it until tolkien intervened on lewis's behalf and praised it to the

00:22:17.460 to the hilt even though privately with lewis he had some serious criticisms of it but again when

00:22:24.180 when they're against the world against the modernist literary establishment or simply trying to get

00:22:29.480 their work out there and get it appreciated they would review each other's works and they would

00:22:33.680 write to publishers and intercede for one another yeah this encouragement in fact that they offered

00:22:40.360 each other uh it was uh especially important for tolkien who's always very hesitant about exposing his

00:22:49.020 great mythology to the public and um who always had doubts about lord of the rings which took him

00:22:56.560 an eternity to to write and if without lewis's constant encouragement and goading uh we wouldn't have

00:23:06.420 the lord of the rings today and you know thanks to lewis we do yeah i was surprised how long it took

00:23:12.840 him to write that i mean it just seemed like decades he was working on it yeah well the problem was that

00:23:18.540 it started out to be it was meant to be a sequel to the hobbit the hobbit had been a book that he had

00:23:24.220 written without great agony because it started with just telling stories to his kids that came naturally

00:23:29.440 um but he had been working since he was a young man in the trenches in the first world war he'd been

00:23:35.580 working on a private mythology and invented languages to go with it and that's what he really wanted to

00:23:41.160 publish but instead the publishers were interested in you know the the new hobbit novel the hobbit

00:23:47.360 sequel so he's trying to write the hobbit sequel but the mythology keeps working its way into that

00:23:54.220 and it was very hard for him to integrate these two dramatically different kinds of creative work

00:24:01.560 in the lord of the rings you can see some of the the the strains the sort of places where it didn't

00:24:07.260 it together perfectly but you you mentioned that you know he was working on this during world war one

00:24:12.740 that's another thing that all these men had in common or for most of them they all served during

00:24:17.420 world war one did that common bond like service some like a way to foster some camaraderie between all

00:24:23.520 of them well it's tremendously important uh in fact we in our book the fellowship we look upon we look

00:24:31.320 at all these writers but most especially lewis and tolkien as war writers uh sure they were fantasists but

00:24:39.840 they were also war writers all of them wrote about war in their fiction um and it's uh ever present in

00:24:49.860 lord of the rings you can't understand lord of the rings without knowing about tolkien's experience in

00:24:56.340 war um and sure they also they shared with the other inklings uh some of the younger ones uh only

00:25:04.800 experienced world war ii i suppose that was certainly true of christopher tolkien uh but they all had war

00:25:12.200 experience for most of them had war experience even the ones who didn't get to actively fight like

00:25:17.780 williams and barfield uh played a part in the war somehow yeah and i think the you know the question

00:25:24.500 you raised earlier about the maleness of this club i think of interest um to your readers and

00:25:31.920 listeners um i think that has a lot to do with it tolkien wrote that by 1918 all but one of his close

00:25:39.660 friends had died these uh men experienced both the the male camaraderie and bonding of the war and the

00:25:47.660 severe loss of having friends fall to the left and to the right and to the front and to the back of

00:25:53.660 them during the war so when they returned from the war they had every reason to prize male fellowship

00:26:00.360 it was a precious and a precarious and a very you know damaged um uh gift yeah i think i remember

00:26:08.620 there's a line where lewis talks about i guess that's sort of him relishing male camaraderie he says he

00:26:13.280 one of the best sounds in the world is like the sound of male laughter yeah his favorite sound adult

00:26:18.280 male laughter adult male laughter and that is a great sound it is because you don't hear it all that

00:26:22.900 often i teach at a woman's college and i try to i try to present that in a way that that my students

00:26:28.160 will be sympathetic to it and they generally are because that is a special thing you really don't

00:26:33.520 hear it all that often because it's very rare where men older men adult men who are married get

00:26:38.660 together and have a good time yeah of course it's it's a good way to escape from the domestic

00:26:45.800 right situation too um so let's talk a little more about lewis and tolkien because i think their

00:26:52.180 relationship is really interesting because it as i read the book it seemed that it was it ebbed and

00:26:58.840 flowed throughout the years that there was a bit of strain there uh between the two i got the impression

00:27:05.680 of the strain was because both of these men had high expectations on what friendship meant

00:27:13.800 um can you tell talk a little bit about what each how each man viewed friendship and the role it

00:27:19.780 should play in a person or particularly a man's life you want to tackle that girl well yeah sure i mean

00:27:28.340 uh lewis you know wrote a book called the four loves in which one of the loves he talks about his

00:27:33.600 friendship and in that book and in other places too he's he's the one that kind of articulated a

00:27:39.100 theory of friendship which is that um especially male friendship uh what characteristic of it is that

00:27:46.260 they're not really focused on each other they're focused on a common interest a common common ideal

00:27:52.000 and you can see this in tolkien's teenage friendship that phil was talking about the tea club and barovian

00:27:57.800 society they they they were really dedicated to something beyond themselves and so um dedicated as

00:28:07.560 they were to uh shared ideals outside of simply their own um personalities um they could still have

00:28:16.940 friction that is the result of differences in their personalities and you know when uh women come 1.00

00:28:23.480 into the picture it's kind of like yoko ono breaking up the beatles you know um or not well causing

00:28:29.520 tensions um they uh they had very different life situations tolkien had uh was very uncomfortable when

00:28:39.760 when lewis um got together with this divorcee joy davidman didn't approve of that relationship there 0.99

00:28:48.220 were a number of things lewis did that tolkien didn't approve of they had religious differences too

00:28:52.780 talking felt that lewis never totally overcame his anti-catholicism from his belfast background

00:29:00.240 but still the friendship uh was sustained over the decades ebbing and flowing as you said but

00:29:08.360 it was sustained it's interesting uh to look at the lord of the rings in this uh with this in mind

00:29:15.260 because the lord of the rings as well as being a war tale is also a tale of friendship of course

00:29:21.620 and in fact a friendship not only among people who had different religious views but uh people of

00:29:28.500 different species uh elves hobbit hobbits dwarves and human beings uh and they had tensions as we know

00:29:39.940 from the book and from the films uh simply by their uh species differences but nonetheless

00:29:47.520 uh the fellowship remained and i think that's in a way it in account of the inklings as well

00:29:54.540 yeah i'm curious like what do you think their legacy is i mean i think we all know like their

00:29:59.640 literary legacy for c.s lewis or tolkien um like where do we still see like that was because of the

00:30:07.740 it wasn't because of the individual it was like we can look at something either in christianity or in

00:30:12.600 literature and we could say it wasn't just tolkien that had that influence it wasn't just lewis it

00:30:16.960 was like it was the dynamic of the group that had that influence like if it weren't for the group

00:30:22.480 that would not have happened anything y'all can point to well i think that in certain ways they had

00:30:31.240 different sectors of influence so lewis became the leading christian writer of the 20th century

00:30:37.680 certainly the most influential public figure um bringing about uh countless conversions among

00:30:45.320 intellectuals and and um all sorts of people um as a popular voice um tolkien who was not so

00:30:53.540 comfortable with that aspect of lewis's legacy um more or less uh created the whole um uh fantasy

00:31:03.660 um world that we're familiar with um in various genres like uh gaming and so on but you know lord

00:31:12.320 of the rings um was is certainly the most successful um work of fantasy of all time so the two of them

00:31:21.040 together are real culture makers and the group as a whole uh could be seen as as culture making

00:31:29.020 um but in different ways not in one monolithic way it isn't you know it isn't a movement with uh

00:31:35.480 placards and manifestos so that um their their influence is a little more subtle than that but

00:31:41.680 extremely strong um so how did the dynamic of the group change did it did it just because of old age

00:31:50.560 they stopped meeting less in sickness um i guess they they are disbanded because like only one of

00:31:56.760 it was alive but did they disbanded because of death or they disbanded because

00:32:01.140 well if you compare it to a group like the beatles the inklings really uh they lasted much longer and

00:32:12.440 they were much better friends even while they were lasting uh nonetheless there were as we said

00:32:18.540 irritants within the group uh especially hugo dyson hugo dyson got so rambunctious and

00:32:25.160 complained so much about tolkien's uh elves uh at the meetings that tolkien stopped reading lord of the

00:32:33.080 rings and uh other members stopped reading various um aspects of their work because of complaints

00:32:41.940 too too many attacks and so on so there was all that friction then there was the fact that they were

00:32:47.980 getting older and turning in other directions um uh the inklings uh eventually stopped as

00:32:56.620 as an active literary group in the 1940s but kept uh late 40s 48 of 49 49 i believe and uh but kept up

00:33:06.680 as a social group until lewis's death in the 1960s so they did last an awfully long time

00:33:15.260 yeah i think lewis was really the center of the group so lewis um towards the end of his life um

00:33:22.860 in the late 40s uh finally got the recognition he deserved he was given a chair um not at oxford but

00:33:29.120 uh at cambridge so he was commuting to cambridge and managed to have the tuesday morning gatherings

00:33:34.700 with him but there was no longer the thursday evening literary uh workshop sort of gatherings in

00:33:40.760 lewis's rooms so that marked a dramatic change i'm curious are you all aware of any literary groups

00:33:48.680 like this today like little private groups in existence like that had the same sort of dynamic

00:33:53.120 well there's an awful lot of writing groups around you know every time i go into barnes and noble i see

00:34:01.360 a group in a corner who are uh trying to break into print and they share uh works with each other but

00:34:08.620 i doubt any of them measure up to the inklings yeah they're probably not talking about whether

00:34:13.400 dogs go to heaven but they're talking well there you know there are definitely attempts to be

00:34:18.100 inklings groups and and all kinds of um a really self-conscious um attempts to follow in that

00:34:25.540 tradition there's a writer named diana pavlak lyre who wrote a book about uh the collaboration among

00:34:32.240 the inklings themselves called the company they keep and then most recently has a book out about

00:34:36.980 literary collaboration and how wonderful it is well i'm curious okay speaking of like you two

00:34:44.080 are a husband and wife team you wrote this book together um i'm and i that's to say like my wife

00:34:50.080 and i work on the website together we write content together uh i'm curious how that dine i'm always

00:34:55.680 curious about how other husband wife teams tell us about your dynamic and maybe did you have you 1.00

00:35:00.580 all gotten some inspiration from the inklings on how to uh critique each other or uh help each other

00:35:05.880 oh well uh with us it's been roses all the way oh i'm sure however uh we do have a method we use

00:35:18.040 which is um well in terms of the fellowship uh carol wrote to her strengths and i wrote to mine

00:35:26.080 without getting specific as to what each of those are well i'll say we we divided the book into

00:35:31.800 different sections and then we would tackle uh whatever sections were assigned to each of us

00:35:38.940 and then we would exchange what we had written and the other person would offer a critique

00:35:45.320 and a rewrite not uh not in the disonian method of savage attack but um i think much more kindly and and

00:35:54.700 um perhaps perceptively seeing what was needed and then we would just mesh it all together um so we

00:36:02.460 actually uh end up we think with the work uh that speaks with the single voice but the voice of two

00:36:10.300 people joined in song nice analogy um carol and phil where can we learn more about uh your work at work

00:36:20.860 in the book um i guess you could google us that's the best thing to do yeah yeah um you know then you

00:36:31.760 get to things like the amazon page where we have both our joint and our separate books um i think

00:36:39.820 there's a couple wikipedia wikipedia yeah great well carol phil zalinski thank you so much for your time

00:36:47.020 this has been an absolute pleasure pleasure for us it's been fun thank you brett i guess they were

00:36:53.020 philip and carol zalinski they're the authors of the book the fellowship the literary lies of the

00:36:57.020 inklings that's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere well that wraps up another

00:37:05.000 edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art

00:37:09.080 of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy the podcast i'd appreciate it if you give

00:37:13.220 his review on itunes or stitcher and as always i appreciate your support and until next time this

00:37:17.680 is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

00:37:19.920 you

00:37:43.220 you

00:37:52.520 you

00:37:54.520 you

00:37:56.520 you

00:37:58.520 you

00:38:02.520 you

The Art of Manliness - February 24, 2016

#178： C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, and the Inklings

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript