The Inklings - CS Lewis JRR Tolkien Charles Williams And Their Friends

Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings is about that Oxford circle of writers, scholars, talkers, pipe-smokers, myth-makers, pint-nursers and professional arguers who gathered in pubs and rooms and somehow managed to produce a quantity of twentieth-century literary furniture that still refuses to leave the house. C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends met, read aloud, criticised, encouraged, interrupted, theologised, grumbled, laughed, and generally proved that one of the most productive things a writer can do is sit in a room with other difficult men and be told the latest chapter is not quite working.

This is the story of the Inklings not as a solemn academy of certified geniuses, but as an actual group: friendships, rivalries, jokes, habits, pubs, colleges, manuscripts, letters, loyalties, irritations and all the human static that surrounds the making of books. Tolkien brings Middle-earth, philology, Catholic depth and the slow, perfectionist labour of someone who can spend years improving a landscape no one else has technically visited. Lewis brings speed, force, argument, Christianity, criticism, children’s fantasy and the conversational momentum of a man who appears to have been born already disagreeing with someone.

Then there is Charles Williams, who tends to arrive in accounts of the Inklings like a mysterious guest who may either be brilliant, alarming, magnetic or in need of clearer filing. Poet, novelist, theologian, occult-adjacent oddity and intense presence, Williams adds a different voltage to the group. Around them move Owen Barfield, Warnie Lewis and others, each contributing to the atmosphere in which myth, faith, language, scholarship and imaginative fiction were treated not as separate departments but as parts of the same roaring coal fire of talk.

The irony, of course, is that the Inklings have become a kind of literary legend themselves, almost as mythologised as the worlds they discussed. We imagine them forever in the Eagle and Child, pints in hand, making remarks of immortal significance between lunch and tutorial obligations. Carpenter is useful because he lets the legend breathe while also showing the chairs, the personalities, the awkwardness, the exclusions, the tensions and the ordinary business of writers being both extraordinary and rather a lot of work.

For anyone interested in Tolkien, Lewis, Oxford literary life, Christian imagination, fantasy, friendship, myth-making or the strange usefulness of being read aloud to by someone who may not spare your feelings, this is a rich and humane account. It shows how books emerge not only from solitary genius but from conversation, irritation, encouragement, laughter, belief and the dangerous moment when one friend says, in effect, “go on then, read the next bit.”

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid HarperCollins volume about a group who turned scholarship, beer, faith, myth and pipe smoke into literature with suspicious efficiency. Suitable for any shelf where wardrobes, rings, angels, Oxford rooms and argumentative friendship are already on speaking terms.

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