#178： C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, and the Inklings
Episode Stats
Summary
Philip and Carol Zaleski have written a biography of the Inklings, a literary group that both Lord of the Ring and C.S. Lewis belonged to for over 30 years at the University of Oxford. In this episode, we discuss the members of the inklings, their impact on American literature, and the lasting impact of the group on religion in the west as well as literature in the West.
Transcript
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we're at mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast if
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you're a tolkien fan you know lord of the rings hobbit or you're a c.s lewis fan you probably
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have heard of the inklings if you haven't heard of the inklings you're in for a treat
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this was a literary group that both tolkien and lewis belonged to for over three decades at
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oxford where they got together one night a week to discuss and critique each other's work but as
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well as talk about philosophy religion myths etc etc while smoking pipes and drinking adult beverages
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it was like a like a little men's group it was only men all men anyways my guests stay on the
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podcast have written a biography of this group it's called the fellowship the literary lies of
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the inklings their names are philip and carol zaleski they're a married couple and today on
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the show we're going to discuss the members of the inklings tolkien lewis also some of the more
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lesser known but who individuals but also who had a profound impact on american literature
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in other ways owen barfield and charles williams and we'll also discuss the lasting impact of the
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inklings on a religion in the west as well as literature in the west great discussion
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uh so without further ado philip and carol zaleski
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philip and carol zaleski welcome to the show thank you thank you brett uh so you two are a
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husband-wife team wrote a book about the inklings now i know a lot of our listeners know who the
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inklings are have heard of them and are big fans of two of the members but for those who aren't
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familiar can you tell us who what were the inklings and who belonged to this little group
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you want to dive in carol or okay yeah we're in different rooms so we can't signal to each other
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but i'd be happy to start out on that um so the inklings was that was a literary club
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um a fellowship this is how we like to think of it um which is perhaps a little runs a little deeper
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than the affiliations you might have in a club and um it was founded um actually uh not by uh
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tolkien and lewis themselves but by an undergraduate named edward tangy lean uh brother of the filmmaker
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david lean at oxford um but tolkien and lewis and a few other uh like-minded friends had been
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gathering since the late 1920s for literary conversation they took over uh from the group
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called the inklings that was founded by edward tangy lean in uh late in 1933 and they used to
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meet in uh c.s lewis's rooms in maudlin college on thursday evenings to read their works in progress
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to each other and then socially they would meet in various pubs on tuesday mornings most likely
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um and that went on until lewis died and on the same day as jfk in 1963 so it was about 30 years
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of gatherings um with a variety of people joining right so it was a literary group yeah c.s lewis
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jr tolkien everyone knows who a lot of people know who they are i've seen lord of the rings you guys
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know who is um but you started off the book talking about um sort of the atmosphere at oxford i thought
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this was really interesting i didn't know much about this but there was this real culture of
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club creation like there was it seemed like there was a club for almost anything and everything
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at oxford at the time and the members of the inklings belonged to other clubs not just the
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inklings um so can you tell us a little bit about this um culture of creating clubs and what kind of
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clubs people could find at oxford during the early part of the 20th century yeah well as you say
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the the clubs were innumerable and both uh tolkien and lewis were avid members of these of many clubs
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uh i think i'd start by pointing out that uh this goes back to tolkien's teenage years
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when he formed a club called the tea club and barovian society uh devoted uh to uh he and his friends
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uh so three or four close friends had decided to join this form this club uh to uh bring goodness and
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honesty and virtue and purity to western civilization so tolkien at a very early age was club oriented
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um lewis dove in when he uh when he went to oxford uh clubs as they belong to included um
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uh lewis belonged to an english faculty club called the cave uh tolkien belonged to uh
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oh gee i wonder if i can remember the name something called the checkers club i think
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right um the essay club that one yeah yeah uh he joined the debating society a club called the
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dialectical society so there were all sorts of clubs uh eventually he and tolkien when uh when they
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first became friends uh formed a club called the cold biters uh which literally means uh men biting
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coal and it's a reference to um ancient icelandic bards and this was a society devoted to norse
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um mythology and norse literature and then it all blossomed in the in queens itself um and while they
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were writing the great works they also belonged to other clubs i think just just to underscore what
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phil was saying about the um the ubiquity of clubs that oxford there's also a long tradition of that
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just in english culture and we talked about that in the book that there were forerunners
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to these clubs um there's a club that um called the friday street club that ben johnson and john
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don belonged to keats even dedicated a poem to it and there was the scribblerus club that had
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jonathan swift and alexander pope and we really were drawn to the club which was founded by samuel
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johnson and the painter sir joshua reynolds and had an amazing group of men edmund burke was in it
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adam adam smith um asiatic jones um and it was similar in many ways to the inklings that is
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there's no platform for the club it's just a place to go and hang out with like-minded people
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all right so i mean it sounds like the inklings was a legacy of enlightenment because the way you
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described it it sounded very much like uh you know benjamin franklin starting the mutual improvement
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and in fact uh c.s lewis is often compared to samuel johnson who is the great enlightenment figure in uh
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in english history okay and is this does this uh club culture still exist at oxford you know i looked
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at the uh oxford university website um there's a long long list of clubs and societies um and debating
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groups which have official sanction but in that respect they're not private clubs um i think that
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the the era of the private men's club is faded i think maybe because it may seem to some people
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elitist or exclusive or that a kind of multicultural and co-ed environment um seems to make it look
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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
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i think that makes inroads into club culture right and that was interesting too by the inklings they had
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a very strict no women rule i think that's almost unstated it's just an assumption um that that you
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would that these would be sex segregated clubs um there was you know stories to circulate about
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dorothy l sayers trying to get into the club and banging on the door and not being let in but that's
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that's apocryphal so i know most people who are listening are probably familiar with um c.s lewis
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and tolkien but there's two other members of the inklings that you highlight and go into deep great
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detail about the biography owen barfield and charles williams and honestly before i read but can you
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tell us a little bit about their what they did their their influence on i guess english literature or
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academics at oxford well sure uh i'd say william charles williams is uh by far the better better known of
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the two because he was a novelist um who published um uh quite a number of uh what people refer to as
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supernatural shockers these are uh thrillers uh or mystery novels or uh would then always involve
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supernatural events uh they were quite popular at the time and they're still popular there are many
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avid uh williams fans uh around these days uh williams was a uh uh in a way a self-taught man uh he uh
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he worked at oxford university press most of his adult life uh became a well-known editor there
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and befriended lewis and then the other uh inklings um in addition to his uh his spiritual shockers
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he uh wrote some marvelous books on dante and on anglican history and on poetry he considered
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himself a poet first and foremost uh barfield is a more obscure figure uh he uh was a specialist in
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the history of language uh in the history of words and how words change over the centuries and he had
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this really brilliant idea which amounts to the reverse engineering of words where you track the
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history of words back in time until you get to their primordial meaning um and through this he thought he
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could trace the history of human consciousness as well uh so as you can imagine his books are a little
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more abstruse uh obscure and uh even a cult than uh than williams are uh but he also has a somewhat of a
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following um some very important people uh saul bellow the nobel prize winner most notably have been
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students of his or disciples of his uh so these are the two most prominent inklings apart from lewis and
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talking and that's why we chose to focus on them as well uh yeah yeah and uh i guess barfield i thought
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it was interesting like he seemed like his entire life he was sort of uh i don't know envious maybe
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but a little envious of the success it wasn't later on it wasn't until later on in life that he actually
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had some renown and some success he experienced that yeah it makes it makes for a beautiful story in a
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way because uh um it's a great tale of someone who is in the shadows for most of his life barfield
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uh didn't have great skills as a fiction writer couldn't make a living as a writer um you can hardly
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make a living as a writer of a historian of uh language so he uh went into the law and while tolkien and lewis
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and many of the other inklings were basking in public acclaim uh poor barfield was toiling away in his
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london law office you know dealing with um real estate matters and torts and so on uh but
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eventually in the 1960s people started reading his books uh mostly at first because he was known as c.s
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lewis's best friend uh and what he came to america barfield did and started uh giving lecture tours
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around america and teaching at american universities and uh these were smash success both above the
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teaching and the lecture tours and people then started reading barfield's own books and they
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discovered that in addition to being lewis's great friend barfield himself had very intriguing ideas to
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offer uh and ideas that fit in rather well with the um tenor of the 1960s and 1970s uh because he was an
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esoteric thinker he was interested in an alternative uh descriptions of of uh history he rejected darwinism
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for example um he uh he was a follower of a of a german um spiritual teacher named rudolf steiner
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uh so barfield came into his own just when the other inklings were dying out and in fact he lived
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to be 99 years old so he had a chance to savor his his late triumph yeah it was great to see like
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it kind of worked out for him in the end yeah um i'm curious you mentioned that there were other
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members of the group like these are the four most prominent uh lewis talking barfield and williams but
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it seemed like also the the membership of the include was very uh there was the uh the critic
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and biographer uh lord david sisal um an immensely attractive figure an important man of letters
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uh who also had ties to the bloomsbury group which had a very different literary and and uh cultural
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mindset um but he was that sort of a generous mind that he could live in both worlds there was an
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important chaucer scholar and theater and film director neville coghill who um actually gave
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richard burton and elizabeth taylor their start in oxford theatrics um and there was a dominican
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named gervais matthew scholar and an english don named hugo dyson very rambunctious fellow
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um there was also um lewis's brother warny um who uh presided at inklings meetings poured the drinks
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um actually he himself struggled with alcoholism but he was a very kind man and uh he also wrote
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he wrote histories of 17th century france and then there were and then a young member was john wayne
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who uh later became known as one of the group called the angry young men
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yeah and also tolkien's son joined as well and tolkien's son right yeah who's who's still alive and is
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the last living in clean i'm curious so they had all these members that would come and join but
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there seemed like these four were like the core i'm curious like what brought these what drew these
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men together because it seems like they come from very different backgrounds right you have
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polkine the catholic with lewis the atheist turned anglican you have barfield who was really into
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esotericism and you had williams who was a poet i mean what was it that drew these men what was the
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common bond between all of them well there are several common bonds first of one perhaps first and
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most importantly they were all writers and not only writers but uh very active and productive
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writers the inclined group really was a writing club they write each other's unpublished uh manuscripts
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works in progress and then they severely criticized each other's works and this criticism uh uh improved
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the works of all the works of all the members uh so that's something they had in common in addition they were all
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christians uh lewis said explicitly to charles williams that being a christian was was a requirement for joining
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the group um they were romantics pretty much to a man they loved language they loved stories uh they loved
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fantasy which set them off from the uh you know the the accepted literary views of the day and um that's
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something that united them they were united then in adversity as well as in comradeship
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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
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anti-modernism but a desire to see the world re-enchanted through its connection to uh to
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traditions and values of the past yeah that was really interesting particularly when you talk about
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c.s lewis and his literature uh he wrote sci-fi a lot of people don't know that they forget that
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you know it really was uh science fantasy more than science fiction um it was just um it was a way for
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him to present mythological and spiritual ideas on uh on a broader canvas he set them on other planets
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but um i don't think they would be considered anything like uh hardcore science fiction right but
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yeah but is that that theme of like they're they were sort of anti-modern but they wanted to recapture
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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
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recovery rather than reaction so recovery really brings into the present um what is worth saving
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from the past and what is still a still a living tradition so it's not a it's not antiquarianism and
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it's not mere nostalgia but it's a sense that there's a real live tradition that perhaps we've
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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
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that's one thing what owen barfield helped with actually he he convinced lewis that the ideas of
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the past um can be i guess evaluated on their own merits and uh that it's only chronological snobbery
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that makes us think that ideas that were uh life-giving in the past are no longer available to us
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great phil you alluded a little bit to the the dynamic it was a writing club they'd come to each
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other they someone would read a work there was criticism do we know what a typical meeting was
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like or like the dynamic in a meeting do we have records of that yeah we have diary diary entries
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by uh mostly by lewis's brother warny lewis who uh near the end of his life uh lamented several times
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that he hadn't kept careful notes i think he said if he realized that what he had had uh what he'd been
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a part of he would have recorded every meeting in detail instead we just have um a brief accounts
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of meetings but we have many of those and we know that uh meetings would start well these were evening
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meetings for the most part at least the ones in lewis's digs of maudlin college which were the more
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important meetings those are the ones in which literary work actually went on the tuesday morning
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meetings were uh more just general socializing so they would they would all gather in the evenings
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and uh warny would uh take coats and would settle uh members down with the drink and then uh c.s lewis
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would ask if anyone had something to read and generally someone did and it would be read and then the
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comments would start uh they also uh discussed ideas uh all manner of ideas so whether dogs go to
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heaven uh the nature of hell um you know if i had warny's diaries in front of me i could tell you about
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30 or 40 amusing things they they discussed uh there was uh a lot of friendship a lot of rivalry
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a lot of caustic comments especially by hugo dyson uh who could be very funny but also could be very
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nasty and has um reflections on other people's works and ideas uh but uh there was a lot of laughter
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uh i think the the group lasted so long because people really enjoyed the meetings they enjoyed uh
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laughing with each other telling stories uh drinking together just having a good time together
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and so i mean when they did offer criticism like did they really go after the person uh with like
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gloves off i mean i think nowadays when people have like reading like you know writers groups like
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everyone's like everyone wants to be really polite but i imagine that's not what happened here
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no they weren't really polite sometimes they could be well hugo dyson be quite vulgar but i'll refrain
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from repeating what he said about uh tolkien's elves um tolkien uh for his part could be quite
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critical of lewis because he felt that lewis was trying to write the kind of mythopaic um
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imaginative literature that tolkien himself was dedicated to but that lewis was kind of slipshot about it
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and didn't really work at building out a completely internally coherent um mythos when he was creating
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imaginary worlds tolkien had very high standards about that no one ever before or ever since
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tolkien has accomplished what he did in terms of uh internally consistent believable invented
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mythologies so um so he would criticize lewis for that um but another thing they did for each other
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though was encouragement i mean when in terms of outsiders they would circle the wagon so they could
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be quite critical of one another but for instance when lewis um tried to get his first science fiction
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fantasy novel published out of the silent planet um the reader's reports were pretty bad and the
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publisher was pretty negative about it until tolkien intervened on lewis's behalf and praised it to the
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to the hilt even though privately with lewis he had some serious criticisms of it but again when
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when they're against the world against the modernist literary establishment or simply trying to get
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their work out there and get it appreciated they would review each other's works and they would
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write to publishers and intercede for one another yeah this encouragement in fact that they offered
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each other uh it was uh especially important for tolkien who's always very hesitant about exposing his
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great mythology to the public and um who always had doubts about lord of the rings which took him
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an eternity to to write and if without lewis's constant encouragement and goading uh we wouldn't have
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the lord of the rings today and you know thanks to lewis we do yeah i was surprised how long it took
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him to write that i mean it just seemed like decades he was working on it yeah well the problem was that
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it started out to be it was meant to be a sequel to the hobbit the hobbit had been a book that he had
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written without great agony because it started with just telling stories to his kids that came naturally
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um but he had been working since he was a young man in the trenches in the first world war he'd been
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working on a private mythology and invented languages to go with it and that's what he really wanted to
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publish but instead the publishers were interested in you know the the new hobbit novel the hobbit
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sequel so he's trying to write the hobbit sequel but the mythology keeps working its way into that
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and it was very hard for him to integrate these two dramatically different kinds of creative work
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in the lord of the rings you can see some of the the the strains the sort of places where it didn't
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it together perfectly but you you mentioned that you know he was working on this during world war one
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that's another thing that all these men had in common or for most of them they all served during
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world war one did that common bond like service some like a way to foster some camaraderie between all
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of them well it's tremendously important uh in fact we in our book the fellowship we look upon we look
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at all these writers but most especially lewis and tolkien as war writers uh sure they were fantasists but
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they were also war writers all of them wrote about war in their fiction um and it's uh ever present in
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lord of the rings you can't understand lord of the rings without knowing about tolkien's experience in
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war um and sure they also they shared with the other inklings uh some of the younger ones uh only
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experienced world war ii i suppose that was certainly true of christopher tolkien uh but they all had war
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experience for most of them had war experience even the ones who didn't get to actively fight like
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williams and barfield uh played a part in the war somehow yeah and i think the you know the question
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you raised earlier about the maleness of this club i think of interest um to your readers and
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listeners um i think that has a lot to do with it tolkien wrote that by 1918 all but one of his close
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friends had died these uh men experienced both the the male camaraderie and bonding of the war and the
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severe loss of having friends fall to the left and to the right and to the front and to the back of
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them during the war so when they returned from the war they had every reason to prize male fellowship
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it was a precious and a precarious and a very you know damaged um uh gift yeah i think i remember
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there's a line where lewis talks about i guess that's sort of him relishing male camaraderie he says he
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one of the best sounds in the world is like the sound of male laughter yeah his favorite sound adult
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male laughter adult male laughter and that is a great sound it is because you don't hear it all that
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often i teach at a woman's college and i try to i try to present that in a way that that my students
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will be sympathetic to it and they generally are because that is a special thing you really don't
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hear it all that often because it's very rare where men older men adult men who are married get
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together and have a good time yeah of course it's it's a good way to escape from the domestic
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right situation too um so let's talk a little more about lewis and tolkien because i think their
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relationship is really interesting because it as i read the book it seemed that it was it ebbed and
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flowed throughout the years that there was a bit of strain there uh between the two i got the impression
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of the strain was because both of these men had high expectations on what friendship meant
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um can you tell talk a little bit about what each how each man viewed friendship and the role it
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should play in a person or particularly a man's life you want to tackle that girl well yeah sure i mean
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uh lewis you know wrote a book called the four loves in which one of the loves he talks about his
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friendship and in that book and in other places too he's he's the one that kind of articulated a
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theory of friendship which is that um especially male friendship uh what characteristic of it is that
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they're not really focused on each other they're focused on a common interest a common common ideal
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and you can see this in tolkien's teenage friendship that phil was talking about the tea club and barovian
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society they they they were really dedicated to something beyond themselves and so um dedicated as
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they were to uh shared ideals outside of simply their own um personalities um they could still have
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friction that is the result of differences in their personalities and you know when uh women come
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into the picture it's kind of like yoko ono breaking up the beatles you know um or not well causing
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tensions um they uh they had very different life situations tolkien had uh was very uncomfortable when
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when lewis um got together with this divorcee joy davidman didn't approve of that relationship there
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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
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