In the end, who has wielded more influence over our culture — Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, or C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien?
The Bloomsbury group of modernist writers, thinkers, and artists had a significant impact on the literary canon. That said, its legacy “now seems part of history, a brilliant stream of art and thought that one admires over one’s shoulder,” write the husband-and-wife scholarly team of Philip and Carol Zaleski in “The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams.”
But the literary efforts of a similar and, in some ways, more daring literary circle, the Inklings, still shape how we spend vast swaths of our leisure time. Without the Inklings and their stories of journeys forward or backward through time, set in lands populated with elves, dragons, lions, and space ships, there would be no Dungeons & Dragons or Harry Potter, write the Zaleskis; “Hollywood, the voice and arbiter of popular culture, has shifted dramatically toward mythopoeic tales,” they note. We have video games about fantasy wastelands, but none about Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” (Though a cool first-person shooter could be set in that poem’s “rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones.”)
The Inklings, write the Northampton-based Zaleskis (Carol is a professor of religion at Smith College), were a “circle of friends, sharing talk, drink, jokes, and writings,” centered at Oxford University. Two core members became iconic literary figures: Lewis (“Jack” to his friends) and Tolkien (“Tollers”). The Zaleskis’ group biography also centers on two of the other “best-known” and “most original” members: Barfield, a devotee of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, who wrote “The Silver Trumpet” and “Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry”; and Williams, author of Christian fantasy novels such as “Descent into Hell” and various plays, poetry collections, and works of theology. Other Inklings included Lewis’s “admirable alcoholic brother” Warren “Warnie” Lewis; Tolkien’s son, Christopher; the boisterous Hugo Dyson; Robert Havard; David Cecil; Nevill Coghill; and John Wain. Members came and went, but no women were allowed, although Dorothy L. Sayers was friendly to the group.
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During the 1930s and 1940s, gatherings were held Thursday evenings in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College; later in the 1940s until Lewis’s death in 1963, they shifted to Tuesday mornings, usually at a pub called the Eagle and Child. At those meetings, Inklings read early drafts of works in progress to each other, including Lewis’s Space Trilogy books and “The Screwtape Letters” and Tolkien’s “Hobbit.” The Zaleskis, who also co-authored “Prayer: A History” and edited “The Book of Heaven,” paint a lost literary world of heady late-night talks over tea, booze, and pipe smoke; philosophical hikes in the countryside; incessant scribblings in diaries; and bookish rivalries that turned occasionally nasty. Privately, Tolkien attacked “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” for its “patchwork mythology” and accused Lewis of “ponderous silliness.” When Tolkien would read from his “Lord of the Rings” manuscript, Dyson was known to shout, “Oh God, not another [expletive] elf!”
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Intercutting the stories of the main quartet with tales of the larger web of cross-pollinating friendships and influences, the Zaleskis draw from a bounty of primary and secondary sources. “The Fellowship” ends with some 100 pages of copious and exacting notes and a bibliography. For super fans of the Tolkien/Lewis duo, much of what “The Fellowship” uncovers isn’t hidden treasure. But for the uninitiated, “The Fellowship” serves as a fascinating overview of this “intellectual orchestra.” It’s a captivating story of young writers finding their literary footing while trying to rectify competing desires for happiness, love, fame, and faith.
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Even today, the fantastic elements of the Inklings’ work mean these authors don’t always get the respect they deserve. Detractors might accuse them of “wishful thinking, a refusal to grow up,” the Zaleskis suggest. Tolkien himself feared “exposure and its terrifying sequel, ridicule” as he toiled for decades on the “private and beloved nonsense” of his Middle-earth legendarium. But, as “The Fellowship” rightly argues, “They were not optimists; they were war writers who understood that sacrifices must be made and that not all wounds will be healed in this life.” Long before flights of fantasy and science fiction became mainstream, what they wrote, and argued over, came to matter.
Lewis once said to his Oxford colleague, “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” They did. And the world and the worlds, both real and invented, are better for it.
The Fellowship:
The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
By Philip Zaleski
and Carol Zaleski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
656 pp., $35
Ethan Gilsdorf, author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks,” can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com and on Twitter @ethanfreak.
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