The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  “my chief joy”: Tolkien, Letters, 26.

  “I don’t much approve”: Tolkien, letter to G. E. Selby, December 14, 1937, quoted in Christopher Tolkien, foreword to J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the Shadow: The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part One (The History of Middle-earth, vol. 6), ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 7. G. E. Selby was an occasional correspondent with an interest in Faërie, perhaps a trifle overbearing in his queries about Middle-earth, who was connected to the College of the Venerable Bede, a teacher-training school in Durham.

  “Goodness knows what … Tom Bombadil”: Tolkien, Letters, 26.

  “A long expected party”: Ibid., 27.

  The first version: See Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide, 531–32.

  “squandered”: Tolkien, Letters, 29.

  “lost my favour: Ibid., 38.

  “flowing along”: Ibid., 40.

  “Prof. Tolkien spoke … one can only stand”: Oxford Mail (August 4, 1938), quoted in Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology, 219.

  March 8, 1939: Not 1938, as Tolkien claims in “Introductory Note,” Tree and Leaf, 5.

  a theory of folklore: The original text of Tolkien’s talk has been lost. The description that follows is based upon the first published version of the talk, a revision that Tolkien prepared in the early 1940s, which was eventually published in 1947 in Essays Presented to Charles Williams.

  “the realm or state … when we are enchanted”: Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 42.

  “not actually present”: Ibid., 66.

  “we make in our measure”: Ibid., 72. This echoes the “Man, Sub-Creator” theme of Mythopoeia.

  “the living Power”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 13. Closer to home, though not in contact with Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers was pursuing the same idea. It would appear as the theme of her play The Zeal of Thy House and her best nonfiction book, The Mind of the Maker.

  “not a lower … elvish craft”: Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 67–68.

  “inner consistency”: Ibid., 66.

  “story-making in its primary”: Ibid., 68.

  “freed from the drab blur”: Ibid., 74.

  “a sudden and miraculous grace … a far-off gleam”: Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” epilogue, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 81–83. In September 2008, “eucatastrophe” was admitted into the OED.

  “who would never … shocked and puzzled”: Owen Barfield, introduction to Romanticism Comes of Age (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 17.

  “Imagination … exact results”: Ibid., 15–16.

  “was nothing less”: Ibid., 14.

  “lost the inestimable”: Owen Barfield, introduction to the 1st ed., Romanticism Comes of Age (London: Anthroposophical Publishing House, 1944), 12.

  “nauseating … a private outpouring”: Blaxland–de Lange, Owen Barfield, 291–93.

  “sword through the marriage knot”: Ibid., 291.

  “very fiery meeting … rather flung the stone”: Ibid., 36.

  “Friendship is the greatest”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 174.

  “my chief companion”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 234.

  “I was probably nearer”: Alan Bede Griffiths, O.S.B.,“The Adventure of Faith,” in Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, 11.

  “I think that it”: Ibid., 19.

  “once and for all … any of the questions”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 135. See also Walter Hooper’s discussion of the relationship in his biographical note on Griffiths, in Collected Letters, vol. 2, 1042–49.

  “I think your specifically”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 178.

  “[Obedience] appears to me”: Ibid., 177.

  “was a great embarrassment”: Griffiths, “Adventure of Faith,” 19.

  “my wretched man … was up till this”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 204.

  biography of the Prophet: Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, rev. ed. (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2006).

  “bog-rats … bog-trotters”: Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 51. We can’t help but wonder whether Tolkien’s initial choice of “Trotter” as the name for his Lord of the Rings hero (discussed below) may be a subtle way of pushing back; while Lewis’s choice of “Ransom” as the name for his Space Trilogy hero (also discussed below) is a friendly gesture toward Tolkien’s Catholicism, and perhaps a way of making amends for their friction.

  “it is papist”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 213.

  “I don’t much like”: Ibid., 213, 170.

  “no one ever knows”: W. H. Lewis, unpublished letter of April 4, 1966, to American friend Mrs. Betty Jones, quoted by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, in W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 174.

  “snivelling … if I had not”: W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 169.

  “There is my dullest”: Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 31.

  “grand week in bed … There’s a good deal”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 210.

  “the best of the sort”: Ibid., 237.

  “spiritual adventures”: January 4, 1947, in ibid., 753.

  materialistic picture of the universe: See Lewis’s discussion of H. G. Wells and the Victorian astronomer Sir Robert Stawell Ball, Surprised by Joy, 65. In Lewis’s day, fear about the cosmic insignificance of human beings was already an old ailment, thus the “ontological wonder-sickness” of William James and the infini-rien of Pascal’s Pensées: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished…” (W. F. Trotter, trans. [London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1908], 61).

  “I like the whole”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 236–37.

  a philologist-hero with such a name: Ransom would learn the significance of his name in the 1944 sequel, Perelandra: “‘It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,’ said the Voice … All in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident … ‘My name also is Ransom,’ said the Voice.” C. S. Lewis, Perelandra: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 1944; reprint ed., 2003), 125–26.

  “Stretched naked”: Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 33.

  “nothing but colours”: Ibid., 43.

  “mere holes”: Ibid., 41.

  “cosy little cosmos”: “A man may say, ‘I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures.’ But if it comes to that why should not a man say, ‘I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see’?” Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1908), 113.

  “to look out”: C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 99.

  “Earth was, by cosmic standards”: Ibid., 97.

  angels assigned to the nations: See Daniel 10:13–21, the Greek version of Deut. 32:8, and Acts 17:26.

  “middle spirits”: Though not sympathetic to Lewis’s Christian viewpoint, William Empson has much of interest to say about Lewis’s scholarly and imaginative treatment of “middle spirits.” He sees Lewis as sanitizing the tradition. See Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, vol. 2, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 155–57, 187–191, 196–97, and Haffenden’s note on 266–67.

  “Lady Luna … calm and kingly”: C. S. Lewis, “The Alliterative Metre,” Selected Literary Essays, 24–26.

  “Mr. Lewis is quite likely … bunk”: Quoted in
Tolkien, Letters, 32.

  “It was the full … Dear Celia”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 129.

  “the anatomical articulation … compressed epigram”: Ibid., 133.

  “I will not discuss”: Ibid., 134.

  “He was”: Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1939), 212.

  “Kierkegaard at any rate”: Charles Williams to Walter Lowrie, letter of December 27, 1937, Walter Lowrie Papers, Princeton University, quoted by Michael J. Paulus Jr., “From a Publisher’s Point of View: Charles Williams’s Role in Publishing Kierkegaard in English,” in Charles Williams and His Contemporaries, ed. Suzanne Bray and Richard Sturch (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 27.

  “He wrote a great deal”: Hadfield, Introduction to Charles Williams, 118–19.

  “lunch … tea”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 140.

  “a thundering good book”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 219.

  “a great work”: Ibid., 249.

  “I’ve never listened … literally struck dumb”: Lyle W. Dorsett, oral history interview with Dr. Robert E. Havard, 32.

  “To MICHAL”: Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2005), 7.

  “substitutions in love”: Charles Williams, Descent of the Dove, 236.

  “The Order has”: Charles Williams, “The Order of the Co-inherence” (1939), in Charles Williams: Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology, ed. Charles Hefling (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1993), 149.

  “used the Companions”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 217.

  “our whole joint world … I cannot believe”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 232–34.

  “Christendom has made”: Ibid., 252.

  “I regret … the time is not far distant”: Tolkien, Letters, 37–38.

  “if there were war … I am as terrified”: Hadfield, Introduction to Charles Williams, 164.

  “God save you, brother”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 271.

  12. WAR, AGAIN

  “of the Trinity”: Morris, Oxford Book of Oxford, 381.

  “bewildered university”: Tolkien, Letters, 44.

  “I have never … unusually intelligible”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 288–89.

  “becoming a common chastitute”: Dyson, quoted in ibid., 360.

  “very witty”: Lyle W. Dorsett, oral history interview with Dr. Robert E. Havard, 27.

  translation of The Aeneid: C. S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, ed. A. T. Reyes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

  “a strange tall gaunt man … really thinks”: Tolkien, Letters, 95–96.

  “a new literary species”: C. S. Lewis, “A Tribute to E. R. Eddison,” On Stories, 29.

  “And so to that”: Quoted by Hooper in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 554.

  “arrogance and cruelty”: Tolkien, Letters, 258.

  “my great friend”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 652.

  “dear Charles … wisdom”: Tolkien’s poem about Charles Williams, quoted in Carpenter, Inklings, 123–26.

  “wholly alien”: Tolkien, Letters, 362.

  “he gave to every circle”: Lewis, preface, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, x.

  “No, I think not”: Carpenter, Inklings, 121. Further information about this marginal note is supplied in John D. Rateliff, “‘And Something Yet Remains to Be Said’: Tolkien and Williams,” Mythlore 45 (Spring 1986): 51 and accompanying note no. 17.

  “seemed like a fleeting glimpse”: Tolkien, Letters, 67.

  “A small knowledge”: Ibid., 80.

  “How stupid”: Ibid., 73.

  “I feel like”: Ibid., 55.

  “never need”: Ibid., 66.

  “out of the darkness”: Ibid., 53.

  “sudden vision … comfort”: Ibid., 99.

  sent him new sections of typescript: As Christopher Tolkien remarked in an interview for the French newspaper Le Monde: “J’étais pilote de chasse. Quand j’atterrissais, je lisais un chapitre” (I was a fighter pilot. Whenever I made a landing, I would read a chapter), “Tolkien, l’anneau de la discorde,” Le Monde Héritages 2/10 (July 7, 2012).

  “topical … little or nothing”: Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, foreword to the 2nd ed., xxii–xxv.

  “I awoke”: Tolkien, “Introductory Note,” Tree and Leaf, 5.

  “little man called Niggle”: J.R.R. Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle,” Tree and Leaf, 73.

  “as he had imagined them … something different”: Ibid., 85–86.

  “colorless”: A Barfield Reader, edited and with an introduction by G. B. Tennyson (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), xix.

  “saying one thing”: Owen Barfield, “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction,” in Lewis, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 111.

  “the long, slow movement”: Ibid., 127.

  “a great trauma”: Owen A. Barfield, personal interview, June 20, 2009.

  “this particular desolation”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 418.

  “blue as a whortle-berry”: Ibid., 531.

  “at least three”: Barfield, “Inklings Remembered,” 549.

  Jeffrey Barfield: See Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide, 759; and Marjorie Lamp Mead, “Owen Barfield: A Biographical Note,” published as the “Afterword” to Owen Barfield, The Silver Trumpet (Longmont, Colo.: Bookmakers Guild, 1986), 117–23.

  “aura of unhappiness”: Quoted in Theresa Whistler, Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (London: Duckworth, 1993), 400.

  “that beautiful carved room”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 346.

  “Am I … you will be attended”: Williams, To Michal from Serge, 50–51.

  “it was Anne”: Ibid., 56

  “held his audiences”: T. S. Eliot, introduction to Williams, All Hallows’ Eve, xii.

  “I begin to believe”: Williams, To Michal from Serge, 52.

  “loftily lunching,” Ibid., 150.

  “It’s obvious”: Quoted in Carpenter, Inklings, 188.

  celebrated together with drinks: See Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, 121.

  “We work between”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 176–77.

  “a kind of parody”: Ibid., 197.

  “full of courtesies”: Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (London: Faber & Faber, 1943), 105.

  “Wherever any love is … there is”: Ibid., 252.

  “the highest point”: T. S. Eliot, Dante (London: Faber & Faber, 1929, 1965), 27.

  “elders … in the ditches”: Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, 21.

  “if you substitute”: Williams, To Michal from Serge, 165.

  “second image … I do not know”: Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, 49–50.

  “has slid from being”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 211.

  “delicate sensitiveness … continually evok[ing]”: Dermot Michael Macgregor Morrah, “Dante’s Beatrice: Knower, Known, and Knowing,” The Times Literary Supplement 2164 (July 24, 1943): 358.

  “part of the furniture”: Quoted in Carpenter, Inklings, 188.

  “I found myself panting”: Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1944–1950: A Noble Daring, ed. Barbara Reynolds (Cambridge, UK: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1998), 45–47.

  “I become more”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 218.

  “a pattern”: Williams, To Michal from Serge, 222.

  “I dislike people … There are wells of hate”: Williams, To Michal from Serge, 7.

  “amor intellectualis”: Williams, To Michal from Serge, 125.

  “You go on”: Ashenden, Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration, 221.

  “O, I wish”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 180.

  “deferential and authoritarian … the constant jerky movements”: Williams, Letters to Lalage, 31.

  “incapabl
e of … Love—obey”: Ibid., 33.

  “Sir, I am”: Ibid., 44.

  “torrent of words … next year”: Ibid., 48–49.

  “in a painfully divided state … I will play”: Ibid., 67–70.

  “Go with God”: Ibid., 80.

  “nothing was”: Ibid., 86.

  “power through sexual transcendence”: Ibid., 69.

  his only victim: See Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride, Women Among the Inklings (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 40.

  “I am sadistic … I wouldn’t hurt”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 104–105.

  “a man … an extended”: T. S. Eliot, “The Significance of Charles Williams,” The Listener 936 (December 19, 1946): 894.

  “in his [Williams’s]”: W. H. Auden, “Charles Williams: A Review Article,” The Christian Century, May 2, 1956, 552–54.

  “I have never known … a gay”: Eliot, introduction to Williams, All Hallows’ Eve, xv–xviii.

  “for the first time”: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 141.

  “was extremely attractive … always found Williams”: Lewis, preface, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, x.

  “I am certain”: Williams, Letters to Lalage, 19.

  “Well, you never know”: Quoted in Walter Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons: The Narnian Chronicles of C. S. Lewis (New York: Collier Books, 1979), 82.

  “Bugger Paxford”: W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 122.

  “like a mother”: Fred W. Paxford, “He Should Have Been a Parson,” in We Remember C. S. Lewis, ed. David Graham (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holman, 2001), 123.

  “our schoolgirls”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 270.

  “kind, solicitous”: Patricia Heidelberger, “Part A: With Girls at Home,” in Schofield, In Search of C. S. Lewis, 53.

  “comfy to be with … what Jack Lewis imposed”: Jill Freud, “Part B: With Girls at Home,” in Schofield, In Search of C. S. Lewis, 57.

  “our dear, delightful June Flewett”: W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 180–81.

  “Beauty and brains”: Quoted in Jill Freud, “Part B: With Girls at Home,” in Schofield, In Search of C. S. Lewis, 59.

  “most complicated Arthur Rackham”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 273.