Charles Williams at Oxford
The Inklings have been called the 20th century’s most influential group of writers. But no matter how accomplished writers become, they still struggle with discouragement. Charles Williams knew this well. When his novel All Hallows’ Eve was released, he waited anxiously for the public response. He wrote a letter to his wife, admitting, “The novel really gnaws me. I feel as if everyone would sneer at it. This is silly, because you liked a lot of it, and [T. S. Eliot] liked it, but there it is! You must forgive me and be kind.”
Then, after two weeks of anxious waiting, Williams opened the Daily Herald and found this enthusiastic review: “A book by Charles Williams is an event. He is considered by some people our greatest living writer. I do not think he will ever be a popular writer, yet I venture to say that his work will go on when you and I and the book of that title have Gone with the Wind.”
Williams was greatly encouraged. He forwarded a copy of the review to his wife and attached a short note. “It could hardly be better,” he said. “All my love, & thank you for supporting A. H. E.”
Like Williams, C. S. Lewis also struggled with discouragement. After reading the proofs of his poem Dymer, he agonized, “I never liked it less. I felt that no mortal could get any notion of what the devil it was all about.” He expressed similar doubts early in the writing of Perelandra, telling his friend Sister Penelope, “I may have embarked on the impossible.” And again, after working for more than ten years on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, Lewis confided his fears to an American correspondent: “The book really begins to look as if it might be finished in 1952 and I am, between ourselves, pleased with the manner of it—but afraid of hidden errors.”
As these examples from Williams and Lewis illustrate, the writing life can be an emotional roller-coaster ride. The excitement of creating is followed by desperate self-doubt. Courage and inspiration compete with discouragement and despair. For innovators in general and for writers in particular, one of the most valuable resources in the midst of these challenges is the presence of resonators.
What is a “resonator”? The term describes anyone who acts as a friendly, interested, supportive audience. Resonators fill many roles: they show interest, give feedback, express praise, offer encouragement, contribute practical help, and promote the work to others. The presence of resonators is one of the most important factors that marks the difference between successful writers and unsuccessful ones.
Resonators show interest in the work itself—they are enthusiastic about the project, they believe it is worth doing, and they are eager to see it brought to completion. But more importantly, they show interest in the writer—they express confidence in the writer’s talents and show faith in his or her ability to succeed. They understand what the writer is attempting. They catch the vision and then do all they can. Resonators help innovators to make the leap from where they are to where they need to be.
Resonators are encouragers. Tolkien recognized this essential gift, expressing thanks to C. S. Lewis: “He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought [The Lord of the Rings] to a conclusion.” Tolkien uses absolute terms when he describes Lewis’s important role as a resonator. He says Lewis was his only audience. Lewis was the only one who encouraged him to seek a wider audience. Without him, Tolkien asserts, the book would never have been written.
In expressing his gratitude to Lewis, Tolkien does more than underscore the importance of resonators. He also suggests several of their most important actions. Resonators serve as an interested audience. They help move the text from the private sphere to the public sphere. As they eagerly anticipate new chapters, resonators inspire—or compel— the writer to produce new text in response. They pressure, push, and persuade the writer to bring long-term projects to a conclusion. And their enthusiasm for what has been done in the past may be just what it takes to encourage the writer to tackle brand-new projects.
Praise for Good Work
Resonators offer their support in a number of different ways, and the most obvious one is praise. Lewis firmly believed praise should be part of daily life. He asserts, “The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars.”
For Lewis, praise is not only a natural part of life, but also one of the most important traits of a healthy mind. He observes, “The humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least.” He sums it up this way: “Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.”
In many ways, the Inklings cultivated this habit of seeking what is good. Warren Lewis tells us that when the Inklings got together, “Praise for good work was unstinted.” His response to The Lord of the Rings (called “the new Hobbit”) illustrates this; it was generous, and it continued off and on for many years. In the following diary entries, Warren Lewis uses familiar nicknames: “Tollers” for Tolkien and “J” (short for Jack) for his brother.
10 October 1946 Tollers continued to read his new Hobbit: so sui generis, so alive with the peculiar charm of his “magical” writing, that it is indescribable—and merely worth recording here for an odd proof of how near he is to real magic.
24 October 1946 Tollers read us a couple of exquisite chapters from the “new Hobbit.” Nothing has come my way for a long time which has given me such enjoyment and excitement; as J says, it is more than good, it is great.
4 July 1947 After dinner I read about half of the batch of [the new] Hobbit which Tollers sent me: how does he keep it up? The crossing of the marshes by Frodo, Sam and Gollum in particular is magnificent.
Praise for stories, poems, plays, lectures, articles, and essays is sprinkled throughout the letters and diaries of the Inklings. Writing to Charles Williams, Lewis characteristically begins with lavish praise: “Though I have not yet finished it I feel I must write and congratulate you on producing a really great book in your He Came Down from Heaven. It is thickly inlaid with patins of bright gold.” Lewis continues, not merely offering general feedback, but investing significant energy to offer praise in detail. He congratulates Williams for “every word on p. 25.” He praises one sentence in particular, exclaiming, “This is really overwhelming. I honestly think it quite likely that when we are in our graves this may become one of the sentences that straddle across ages like the great dicta of Plato, Augustine, or Pascal.” Then there is a clever backhanded compliment: “And it’s so clear, which at one time I should never have expected a book of yours to be.”
And here is the sentence, written by Williams, the one Lewis called timeless and unexpectedly clear: “If, per impossibile, it could be divinely certain that the historical events upon which Christendom reposes had not yet happened, all that could be said would be that they had not yet happened.”
Among the Inklings, praise was lavishly expressed and gratefully received. Williams clearly appreciated Lewis’s enthusiasm—he comments in his letters that Lewis is the one person who really understands him. He writes to his wife, “Lewis says that my last Monday’s address [a lecture on Milton] was ‘the most important thing that has happened in the Divinity Schools for a hundred years, or is likely to happen for the next hundred.’”
It may seem that Williams is exaggerating Lewis’s response, but Lewis’s account of the same event suggests that he is not. Lewis shows his appreciation by describing the effect of this lecture on the students: “It was a beautiful sight to see a whole room full of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which can not be faked, very puzzled, but spell-bound.” In an echo of Williams’s own account of the event, Lewis continues, “It was ‘borne in upon me’ that that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures.” He concludes, “I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom.”
C. S. Lewis writes movingly about Williams on a number of occasions, but he was by no means his only fan. Warren Lewis greatly appreciated him, writing the following letter to him in September of 1937, quite early in their friendship:
This letter, though emanating from the above seat of learning [Oxford], is not from Lewis the English Tutor, but from his fat brother,— whom you may remember to have met on a couple of pleasant occasions, and who is glad to hear that there is a prospect of seeing you down here some time this term.
I wanted to tell you how much I have enjoyed “Descent into Hell”: though on second thoughts perhaps “enjoyed” is hardly the right word: I should rather say how much I appreciated it. Up to this I have always thought that the death of Sir Giles Tumulty [in Many Dimensions] was your high water mark, but the Descent seems to me far in a way better—it will be a long time before I forget those footsteps pattering through Battle Hill at night!!
This gracious and appreciative letter continues with more compliments, balanced with gentle criticism: “The only character whom I thought did not perhaps altogether pull his weight was the playwright: I don’t quite know why, but he did not seem to me strong enough. All the rest I thought magnificent.”
Other Inklings also wrote letters in praise of one another. C. S. Lewis and Nevill Coghill read one another’s poetry and provided detailed feedback. Encouragement played a significant part in their exchange. When Coghill wrote a particularly enthusiastic response to Dymer, Lewis expressed his gratitude. “My dear Coghill,” he writes, “It is as if you had given me a bottle of champagne—a dangerous moment and difficult to reply to.”
Lewis and Barfield, friends since their days as undergraduates, regularly exchanged manuscripts and critiques, and many of these letters include high praise. In 1930, for example, Barfield sent Lewis an essay, along with a letter expressing doubts about the work and asking specifically for some honest feedback. Lewis reassured him, “Don’t think it has failed either per se or in its effect on me. It is bathed in a golden cloud & drips with honey—well worth doing a good bit more on.”
Such encouragement is typical of Lewis’s feedback, which at times is downright extravagant. For example, when Barfield sent him a draft of his poem “The Tower,” Lewis declared, “I have no doubt at all that you are engaged in writing one of the really great poems of the world.” In a diary entry, Lewis praised this poem again, saying it is “full of magnificent material and never a dead phrase: the new part strong and savage.”
Barfield himself confirms that Lewis thought highly of his work: “When [Lewis] read Saving the Appearances, he called it a ‘stunner’; Worlds Apart, when it first came out, he said he found so exciting that he was in danger of reading it too quickly; and shortly before his death, when he was confined to his bed, he wrote to me that the two things that consoled him most were reading that book, Worlds Apart, and the Iliad.” Barfield was understandably pleased to see his novel mentioned side-by-side with Homer’s Iliad, one of the enduring classics of western literature.
Not all of their feedback was this detailed or extensive. When Lewis finished writing a poem called “The Birth of Language,” he sent it off to Barfield with a request for feedback, as was his custom. Barfield writes, “I have a very vivid memory of receiving it by post. I was very busy at the time and quite immersed in a non-literary milieu. I seized a postcard, wrote the one word ‘Whew!’ on it and dropped it in the letter box!”
Even though Tolkien was known to grumble, he, too, could be enthusiastic and generous in his praise of the work of his friends. When Lewis had trouble finding a publisher for Out of the Silent Planet, Tolkien wrote two letters to Stanley Unwin, urging him to publish it. Tolkien not only expresses his admiration for the work, but also bolsters his opinion by invoking the consensus of the Inklings. He writes, “I read it, of course; and I have since heard it pass a rather different test: that of being read aloud to our local club (which goes in for reading things short and long aloud). It proved an exciting serial, and was highly approved.” Tolkien praises the novel’s language, its poetry, its inventiveness, and its “spice of satire.” With flourish, he concludes, “I at any rate should have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print, and loudly recommended it.”
He liked Out of the Silent Planet; he also liked the second book in the series, Perelandra, calling it “a great work of literature.” And when he read the third book, That Hideous Strength, he explained that even though he didn’t consider it a “proper conclusion” to Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, it was certainly “good in itself.” Others have echoed this view.
Tolkien wrote a long description of Lewis’s “Myth Became Fact,” praising it highly and calling it “a most interesting essay.” He was enthusiastic about Letters to an American Lady, saying he found it “deeply interesting and very moving.” And he called English Literature in the Sixteenth Century “a great book.”
Taken all together, Tolkien’s response to C. S. Lewis’s works was somewhat mixed, as we will see in the next chapter. But he had nothing but praise for the writing of Warren Lewis. Tolkien admitted that he was not inherently interested in the historical subjects Warren Lewis explored. Even so, he was captivated by the skill and grace of the writing itself, calling it witty and learned, “very good,” and “very amusing.”
All of the Inklings encouraged one another, but Charles Williams seems to have been uniquely gifted at it. Williams’s biographer, Alice Mary Hadfield, explains that Williams had this effect on everyone he met, whether a stranger at a bus stop or an old, familiar friend. She summarizes his impact as follows: “C. W. could make each one seem important and interesting, a vital gift to most of us, but even more than that, he could make life important and interesting, not some life removed from us by money, opportunity or gifts, but the very life we had to lead and should probably go on leading for years.”
W. H. Auden highlights this when he says, “In his company one felt twice as intelligent and infinitely nicer than, out of it, one knew oneself to be.”
Williams brought a unique quality to the Inklings, to the classroom, to personal relationships, and to his workplace. What was the exact nature of this transforming presence? Gerard Hopkins puts it this way: “He found the gold in all of us and made it shine.” Although all of the Inklings were quick to praise, Williams charged the very atmosphere with praise and encouragement wherever he went.
Pressure and Perseverance
Generally, resonators provide encouragement in a positive, nurturing way. But there is another form of encouragement, one that is forceful, even coercive, in nature. There is a hint of this in the interaction between Lewis and Tolkien. Tolkien explains that when he produced text that was not up to par, Lewis would turn to him and say, “You can do better than that. Better, Tolkien, please!” Tolkien writes, “I would try. I’d sit down and write the section over and over.” Lewis admits that his part in Tolkien’s writing process often “carried to the point of nagging.”
In fact, when a reader wrote to Lewis to ask if Tolkien was working on another book, Lewis confessed, “When you’ll get any more in print from him, Lord knows. You see, he is both a procrastinator & a perfectionist.”
Tolkien needed the pressure. He required the presence of others in order to keep writing, and his work on The Hobbit is a good example. Tolkien drafted most of it in 1930 and 1931. He read it to his sons and showed it to C. S. Lewis, who had a “delightful time” reading it and declared that, apart from the rough ending, he thought it was “really good.” In the summer of 1936, some staff members at Allen & Unwin Publishing Company learned of the story and urged Tolkien to finish it. Responding to their interest, he completed the book and submitted it on 3 October 1936. It was published about a year later. A word of praise, a publisher, and a looming deadline were the ingredients Tolkien needed in order to bring that project to a close.
Pressure continued to play an important role in Tolkien’s writing process. Responding to his publisher once more, Tolkien recorded cautiously on 19 December 1937, “I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits.” He struggled to make progress, and as he wrote, the book took on a life of its own, gaining darker elements and becoming much more layered and complex. But by August 1938, Tolkien reported that the book was “getting quite out of hand.” The project that had begun as just another Hobbit story—suitable for children and filled with picnics, parties, fireworks, riddles, and pranks—had become richer, more complicated, and much more challenging to write.
Tolkien was discouraged. By 1942, he was uncertain about the direction of the story, complaining that he “did not know how to go on.” There were a number of factors weighing him down. For one thing, given the shortages and distractions of wartime, Tolkien had begun to wonder if the publication of such a long book was even a possibility.
Despite these deep misgivings, Tolkien told Unwin that he hoped to finish the book within the next few months. Instead, he abandoned it altogether, and “not a line on it was possible for a year.”
Tolkien was “dead stuck.” Then, on 29 March 1944, he had lunch with C. S. Lewis. Lewis provided encouragement in two different ways. First, he shared his own work in progress. Tolkien records, “The indefatigable man read me part of a new story!” In the act of sharing his own work, Lewis challenged Tolkien, providing more than a hint of friendly rivalry.
But Lewis also goaded him directly, urging him to get back to work and finish his book. Grumbling, yet appreciative, Tolkien writes, “He is putting the screw on me to finish mine. I needed some pressure, & shall probably respond.”
This talk with Lewis proved to be a critical turning point. Five days after their meeting, on 3 April 1944, Tolkien writes, “I have begun to nibble at [The Lord of the Rings] again. I have started to do some (painful) work on the chapter which picks up the adventures of Frodo and Sam.” And two days after that, Tolkien writes, “I have seriously embarked on an effort to finish my book, & have been sitting up rather late: a lot of re-reading and research required. And it is a painful sticky business getting into swing again.” From that time, Tolkien reports steady, significant progress and records that Lewis and the others offered frequent praise for the chapters he read at Inklings meetings.
Resonators made the difference. Tom Shippey asserts, “I am sure that Tolkien would never have finished The Lord of the Rings without Lewis continually encouraging him and urging him on.” Carpenter says that Tolkien very nearly abandoned the whole project and confirms that his decision to press on was “chiefly due to the encouragement” of C. S. Lewis.
Did his encouragement make any difference? After all, Lewis famously declared “No-one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.” It is a bold statement. But is it true?
Ultimately, Tolkien himself provides the answer, making it clear that he appreciated his friends and more: he recognized that they were crucial to his writing process. He writes, “But for the encouragement of C. S. L. I do not think that I should ever have completed or offered for publication The Lord of the Rings.” And again, “Only by his support and friendship did I ever struggle to the end of the labour.” And again, “I owe to his encouragement the fact that in spite of obstacles (including the 1939 war!) I persevered and eventually finished The Lord of the Rings.”
Lewis may have wondered from time to time if all his “nagging” made a difference. But the evidence is overwhelming; it made all the difference in the world.
The Wager
The rocky and uneven path that led to the completion of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings shows just how important encouragement and accountability can be. But what about the spark that inspires a project in the first place? What part do resonators play? Tolkien finished The Lord of the Rings in 1949, but the mutual influence of Tolkien and Lewis began many years before.
In 1936, Tolkien and Lewis were largely unknown and unpublished authors, even though they had been writing all of their lives. Then Lewis read The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams and A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. The two novels are very different from one another, but they share one important trait: they offer a skillful blend of popular fiction with spiritual ideas. Lewis found the combination compelling, but he was hard-pressed to find other books that succeeded in quite the same way.
With this in mind, he approached Tolkien with a proposal: “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” The two men talked a while and then tossed a coin, deciding Lewis would write about space travel and Tolkien would write about time travel. Tolkien elaborates, “We originally meant each to write an excursionary ‘Thriller’; a Space-journey and a Time-journey (mine) each discovering Myth.”
Lewis went home and started Out of the Silent Planet. It appears that as he began writing, his wager with Tolkien was heavy on his mind. His main character, Elwin Ransom, is a professor and an expert in languages. His name, “Elwin,” means “Elf-friend.”
Out of the Silent Planet was finished in September 1937 and published one year later, followed by Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945).
Tolkien’s effort to write time-travel, which he called “The Lost Road,” was never completed. Tolkien explains, “My effort, after a few promising chapters, ran dry: it was too long a way round to what I really wanted to make, a new version of the Atlantis legend.” The fragment and Christopher Tolkien’s illuminating commentary on it have been published in The Lost Road and Other Writings.
Although Tolkien did not make much progress with “The Lost Road,” the wager that inspired it still proved fruitful. “The Lost Road” is intimately connected with another project called “The Fall of Númenor.” In fact, it is not only the basis for that work, but also for the whole concept behind it. Christopher Tolkien has concluded that Númenor as a distinct part of Tolkien’s mythology “arose in the actual context of his discussions with C. S. Lewis.”
There is more. Tolkien suggests that The Lord of the Rings itself was the result of this single conversation, this famous wager. Reflecting back to the wager as his starting point, he writes, “At last my slower and more meticulous (as well as more indolent and less organized) machine has produced its effort. The labour! I have typed myself nearly all of it twice, and parts more often; not to mention the written stages!” Tolkien concludes, “But I am amply rewarded and encouraged to find that the labour was not wasted.”
Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, “The Lost Road,” “The Fall of Númenor,” The Lord of the Rings. Each one has a long and intricate history. But they all have their genesis in the same place. They were born out of a specific conversation, a friendly competition, the toss of a coin, and a challenge to write thrillers, each one “discovering Myth.”
“Think of a Subject”
We tend to think of writers creating their work from deep wells of personal inspiration. But often a creative spark is struck from some kind of external circumstance. The Inklings received ideas and motivation from a number of outside sources—Tolkien’s publisher asking for another Hobbit book, for example, or Lewis’s publisher asking him to write something on the problem of pain, or the wager between Tolkien and Lewis.
Charles Williams regularly sought suggestions for new projects. On 21 June 1940, as he wrapped up several writing projects, he sent an urgent letter to his wife: “Think of a subject for a new novel, I beg you; let it be supernatural this time, because I am more certain there.” Her suggestions helped shape the direction of his next novel, which opens with a discussion between two dead women as they walk the streets of London.
Owen Barfield also responded to ideas and suggestions from others. Barfield explains: “I had casually remarked to my friend C. S. Lewis that I seemed to be feeling an impulse to write a play in verse and was wondering about a subject … I recall the occasion very clearly and, though I am not reproducing his exact words, he said in effect: ‘Why not take one of the myths and simply do your best with it—Orpheus for instance?’ To which my mental reaction was, after some reflection: Well, why not?”
The mood of this conversation is comfortable and low key: Barfield asks for an idea, Lewis throws out a very specific suggestion, Barfield says, “Well, why not?” and then he gets to work. Both the ease and the specificity are typical of the interactions of these two Inklings and quite characteristic of the way the group worked. When Barfield produced Orpheus, Lewis was thrilled with the result. The play influenced him deeply, and he confessed, “Act II is simply superb. It brought tears to my eyes.”
Like Williams and Barfield, Lewis was open to ideas for new projects. One came from Inkling James Dundas-Grant. Lewis was ill, and Dundas-Grant went to visit him in an Oxford nursing home. He recalls, “I leaned over the end of the bed and watched him, obviously under drugs. One eye opened. ‘Hullo, D. G. Nice to see you.’ He drowsed off again, and as I was about to slip out I heard him say, ‘Not going yet, are you?’ and he stirred up fully awake. After a brief chat, I said, ‘Jack, I wish you’d write us a book about prayer.’ ‘I might’, he said, with a twinkle. Then he dozed off again.”
Lewis’s last book was Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer.
“It’s Catching!”
Warren Lewis, one of the most active and talented members of the Inklings, benefited a great deal from the group. He became a published writer as the direct result of their example. Warren had worked on different writing projects throughout his life. As a child, he wrote imaginative tales of India, and as an adult, he kept a diary that shows his talent for graceful prose.
His first extended writing project was to compile and edit his family papers. He describes the work as follows:
My father died in 1929 … and when we came to examine his papers we found that he had never destroyed anything—not even the stubs of his used cheque books. All this material was shipped over to my brother’s rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, and we decided vaguely to sort it out at some future date. I retired in 1931 and came to live in Oxford myself. I had not begun to write in those days and wanted some occupation, so I went through this mass of documents, and decided—more or less as a joke—that I should compile and type ‘The Lewis Papers’. This I did, including diaries in addition to letters, and covering a period 1850–1930.
Warren Lewis spent more than four years selecting, typing, and arranging these materials. He ended up with eleven volumes of The Lewis Papers. When they arrived from the binders, he pronounced the project a great success and declared that he was delighted with it. These volumes are a monumental achievement, offering a compelling account of the time. They are available to scholars at The Wade Center, Wheaton College, and they remain one of the most important sources of information we have about Lewis and his friends and family.
Despite the success of this project, it was not until some time later that Warren Lewis thought of writing anything for publication. He had a keen interest in the past and had been reading and writing about French history for many years. In 1934, he started to work with the material more deliberately, but he saw little value in the exercise. He notes in his diary, “I now write from time to time, a doggerel history of the reign of Louis XIV, to my own intense amusement, and, being under no illusions as to its practical value, do not see any danger in so doing.” Like Tolkien, he never imagined that his writing would amount to anything more than a private hobby.
What inspired this retired army officer to take his writing more seriously? He was encouraged by the example of the Inklings. On 13 April 1944, Tolkien sent a report of an Inklings meeting in a letter to his son Christopher. Warnie is writing a book, he says, then adds with apparent pride, “It’s catching!” Tolkien was more than enthusiastic—he calls Major Lewis’s book the best entertainment of the evening. This literary dabbler found the atmosphere of the Inklings contagious. Warren Lewis became an active, accomplished author due to the modeling of the group.
Warren Lewis published seven books on seventeenth-century France, all highly praised. One of these, The Sunset of the Splendid Century, earned this accolade: “This book has not only scholarship; it has wit and a warm insight into human nature—endowments which are not always found in an historian.” Another reviewer claimed that his “readability, wit and good sense almost equalled his brother’s work.”
The Inklings made a significant difference. Late in his life, Warren Lewis observed that his earnings as an author came to a total of £9,766 10d. He records with some wonder, “Not so bad for a complete amateur who was over fifty eight when he turned author!” He tells us that his brother had urged him to try his hand at writing earlier. But as it turned out, his career as an author was to flourish later, within the context of a supportive and active group.
Anticipation
There is another way that sharing your work in a group can shape a piece of writing. It is more subtle and harder to trace. But it may be just as profound as the influence of praise, pressure, competition, or example. Most writers find it easier to write when they have specific deadlines. When they meet in a group, each meeting provides accountability. Week after week, the Inklings knew they would face the same question: “Well, has nobody got anything to read us?” This motivated them to stay on track and make regular progress on their manuscripts.
Also, when writers are part of a group that meets at regularly scheduled times, they may begin to write with that particular audience in mind. They work deliberately to attract certain kinds of compliments. They revise in order to avoid particular kinds of criticism. It certainly seems likely that as C. S. Lewis sat at his writing desk, his thoughts might have run something like this: “If I use this phrase, it might offend Charles. I’d better define this term, or Owen will have something to say about it. That description is awkward; Tolkien won’t like it. I’d better take some time, think it over, and rewrite it.”
The Inklings adjusted what they said and how they said it in anticipation of the questions, concerns, biases, and tastes of this ever-present audience. Owen Barfield admits to just this kind of anticipation. He says, “If I’m writing anything to do with the theory of knowledge, with the nature of thought, I find myself always putting it in the form of a question to myself: Is this something that Jack could knock down? Is it something which is proof against any objection he would raise?”
Was this kind of anticipation also important to Tolkien? It looks that way. One indication may be the distinct difference between two of his books: The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
The Silmarillion did not develop in the context of an eager audience. Tolkien wrote it for his own amusement, for he found the myths and genealogies and languages of Middle-earth endlessly fascinating.
The Lord of the Rings, in contrast, was written to satisfy the demands of a publisher; Tolkien began “the new Hobbit” unwillingly. And he read it aloud, chapter by chapter, as it was written. It was critiqued and revised in a circle of interested readers.
Tolkien was completely aware of the difference in these two projects. He writes, “The Silmarillion is quite different [from The Lord of the Rings], and if good at all, good in quite another way.” The Silmarillion contains some of the most beautiful passages Tolkien has ever written, but it is demanding to read, challenging to connect with, and far less popular. Author Gareth Knight characterizes the influence of the Inklings this way: “Tolkien began to come out of his Silmarillion shell and opened up gradual access to that world, first with The Hobbit, and then, like the slow opening of a flower, The Lord of the Rings.”
There is something of a parallel between Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress: both are among their authors’ least accessible texts, and both were written apart from the Inklings. Lewis himself recognized the difficulty of his book. In a letter to a reader, Lewis says, “I don’t wonder that you got fogged in Pilgrim’s Regress. It was my first religious book and I didn’t then know how to make things easy. I was not even trying to very much.” We can credit the Inklings for serving as a lively, interested audience. They helped both Tolkien and Lewis learn how to write for general readers in the many books that followed.
A Cup of Tea
The role of a resonator is capacious and powerful, and yet, very often it is lived out in small and rather ordinary ways: paying bills, running errands, providing meals, buying books, handling mundane chores, typing or retyping texts, and sharing research materials or study space.
During the time that Charles Williams lived in Oxford, both his living space and workspace were severely cramped. He shared a large house at 9 South Parks Road, close to the center of Oxford. The bedrooms were not heated, so in the evenings, the members of the household gathered around the fire in the sitting room. It was a congenial group, but the lack of privacy made it difficult for a writer. Williams sat among them, writing poems, plays, and stories on a little pad of paper that he rested on his knee.
If his living situation was distracting and uncomfortable, his office space was worse: his employer had created space for him in an unused bathroom. Apparently, he made the best of it: “It was a large roomy bathroom, leading off the first-floor landing and overlooking the entrance. The covered bath made a good shelf for piles of manuscripts and books.”
Sensitive to his friend’s needs, C. S. Lewis encouraged Williams to use his rooms at Magdalen College as a more congenial place to work. Williams reports to his wife in a letter: “It is all very still. I have fled to Lewis’s rooms; the College is silent all round me. I shall only go back to supper. He is [a] great tea-drinker at any hour of night or day, and left a tray for me with milk & tea, & an electric kettle at hand. Sound man! You must come here one day and see my refuge.” It is clear that Williams appreciated Lewis’s thoughtfulness. He was grateful for the practical assistance and the cheer of a good cup of tea.
Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen served as a refuge for Warren Lewis as well. Their house, the Kilns, was a lively household, consisting of the Lewis brothers, Janie Moore, her daughter Maureen, Fred Paxford the gardener, and a variety of cooks, housekeepers, and other help. They also kept a number of animals, including dogs and cats.
Warren Lewis described it as “a house which was hardly ever at peace for 24 hours, amid senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies, and scares.” Consequently, he kept most of his books in his brother’s rooms at Magdalen and spent his mornings there, researching and writing. One of Lewis’s students, Helen Tyrrell Wheeler, had this experience when she came to visit: “My other tutors, Dame Helen Gardner and Lord David Cecil, lived in elegant, orderly eighteenth-century rooms which always seemed full of brightness: sunshine or firelight or both. Quite different was Lewis’s. There were of course books everywhere, but that was true of every room one went into in Oxford. These books had taken over—so that comfort had long departed. It was quite a business to find seats.”
From time to time during her tutorial, Wheeler would catch a glimpse of Warren Lewis at work. She remembers, “There would, now and again, appear a very stealthy figure, who with a murmured greeting would track down a wanted book and disappear again into limbo. This, we gathered, was Lewis’s brother. Informed opinion in Oxford at the time held that he was the world’s greatest authority on all those families of that French aristocracy who had suffered during the Revolution; and that he knew the tiniest detail of their disastrous lives. I have no idea if this interesting belief is correct.” It was.
Fanfare
The Inklings lavished considerable time and talent on each other’s work in progress. This may have been something as simple as purchasing copies of the work. We know, for example, that John Wain’s first book, a slim collection of nineteen poems entitled Mixed Feelings, was printed in a limited edition of 120 numbered copies and six of the Inklings—Lewis, Tolkien, Havard, Dyson, Coghill, and Warren Lewis—are named on the list of “subscribers before publication.”
They also shared books with one another. Nevill Coghill’s decision to give Lewis his copy of Williams’s novel The Place of the Lion is a typical act of promotion, and a powerful one, for it ultimately paved the way for Williams to join the Inklings.
Lewis lent Tolkien his copy of The Silver Trumpet, a fairy tale written by Barfield. Sometime later, Lewis wrote to Barfield to tell him of the enthusiastic reception: “It is the greatest success among [Tolkien’s] children that they have ever known. His own fairy-tales, which are excellent, have now no market: and its first reading—children are so practical! — led to a universal wail ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’” The letter ends with this quick comment: “Cecil [Harwood] now has The Place of the Lion: get it out of him before he returns it to me.”
Furthermore, the Inklings made it a habit to recommend books to others. For example, Williams tells his colleague Lois Lang-Sims, “You must read CSL’s Allegory of Love—a great book on European poetry from Rome to Spenser: you might, I think, like it.” Lewis tells a student that he should read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but makes it clear he must use the Tolkien/Gordon edition and no other. Lewis enjoins his friend Sister Penelope, “Do you know the works of Charles Williams? Rather wild, but full of love and excelling in the creation of convincing good characters.”
They also wrote and published more than forty reviews in order to promote their work to the largest possible audience. Williams wrote many reviews, including two different endorsements of The Screwtape Letters. One was published in The Dublin Review. Williams explains that he wants to lend his voice to “reinforce the general recommendation” of Lewis’s book. He adds that he not only admires its skill, but also finds it edifying: he recommends it “with the personal sincerity of one who has found himself warned and enlightened.”
The other review was published in Time & Tide, and the whole review is written as an imitation of Screwtape himself, as if one devil is writing advice to another. Williams’s review begins, “My dearest Scorpuscle.” In the last paragraph he warns his readers that Lewis’s book is “heavenly,” and, therefore dangerous. He writes, “I hate it, this give-away of hell.” Williams signs the review “Your sincere friend, Snigsozzle.”
Williams shows a similar blend of humor and insight in his review of The Problem of Pain. He has high praise for Lewis’s skill as a writer, noting that his style is “what style always is—goodness working on goodness, a lucid and sincere intellect at work on the facts of life or the great statements of other minds.” Poking fun at his own tendency toward obscurity, Williams explains that he does not intend to offer the reader a paraphrase of the book: “Mr Lewis’s prose is known, and those who know it would not thank me for translating it into mine.”
Lewis reviewed The Hobbit twice, once in The Times Literary Supplement, and again in The Times. Lewis praises Tolkien as a sub-creator: “No common recipe for children’s stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien.” He adds a comment that is part compliment, part encouragement, and perhaps just a little part gibe at his friend’s thoroughness. He writes that Tolkien “obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale.” These and other references to the background mythologies of the story testify to Lewis’s familiarity with this larger body of work. They also show Lewis giving generous praise to Tolkien in the area where Lewis himself struggled, the development of a detailed and internally consistent sub-created world.
In this review, Lewis also reflects his own conviction about the nature of children’s literature, that no book can be said to be good for children unless it is also good for adults: “This is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. … Only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true.”
He adds, “It may be years before we produce another author with such a nose for an elf.” He ends by predicting, accurately enough, “The Hobbit may well prove a classic.”
Lewis also published two enthusiastic reviews of The Lord of the Rings. His majestic endorsements have been quoted so often that they have become part of the fabric of Tolkien studies: “Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart.” Lewis is unabashed in his enthusiasm: here is a story, he calmly insists, that “will soon take its place among the indispensables.” He admires the story’s structure, its theology, geography, paleography, languages, and characters. He even praises the giving of names: “The names alone are a feast, whether redolent of quiet countryside (Michel Delving, South Farthing), tall and kingly (Boramir [sic], Faramir, Elendil), loathsome like Smeagol, who is also Gollum, or frowning in the evil strength of Barad Dur or Gorgoroth; yet best of all (Lothlorien, Gilthoniel, Galadriel) when they embody that piercing, high elvish beauty of which no other prose writer has captured so much.”
Lewis also offers the definitive answer to those who condemn this book because it is fantasy. “‘But why’, (some ask), ‘why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?’ Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality.” He continues, “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story.”
In this review, Lewis’s writing is at its best; his use of description, metaphor, and the felicitous phrase is simply as good as it gets. He writes, “But in the Tolkienian world you can hardly put your foot down anywhere from Esgaroth to Forlindon or between Ered Mithrin and Khand, without stirring the dust of history.” Lewis shows more than mere enthusiasm for this work; he knows it intimately, understands it fully, loves it deeply, explicates it faithfully, defends it fervently. It has touched him bone-deep.
Lewis also wrote two reviews of Williams’s Taliessin through Logres; one of them, published in Theology, is a full eight pages long. He begins by acknowledging that the work is very hard to read. Lewis accuses Williams of misusing the English language. And, singling out one passage in particular, he admits “the obscurities are to me impenetrable.” However, Lewis reassures us that, despite these problems, it is worth pressing on: “The poem has greatness enough to justify the intensive study it exacts.” He praises the work chiefly for its “combination of jagged weight and soaring movement, its ability to narrate while remaining lyric, and (above all) its prevailing quality of glory—its blaze.”
These reviews are a concrete form of practical support. Each one does two important things: encourages the author and increases public awareness of the work. Of all the reviews of the Inklings’ books, one stands out among the rest. When he was 13 years old, Christopher Tolkien tried to do his part to boost his father’s sales. He writes, “In December 1937, two months after publication, I wrote to Father Christmas and gave The Hobbit a vigorous puff, asking him if he knew of it, and proposing it to him as an idea for Christmas presents.” In his letter, Christopher tells the history of the story, explaining that his father had written it “ages ago, and read it to John, Michael, and me in our winter ‘reads’ after tea in the evening.”
And then he offers Father Christmas this final encouragement: “It is my favourite book.”
DOING WHAT THEY DID: It is virtually impossible to sustain faith in creative work alone, especially when a project extends over a long period of time. Harold Lasswell coined the term “resonators” to describe what is needed: not just words of encouragement or praise, but a whole range of activities, everything from helping to find an idea for a new project to promoting the work to a much larger public.
When something resonates, it vibrates at the same frequency as something else—the wooden body of a violin, for example, catches and amplifies the sound that is made by the strings. Fundamentally, a resonator is someone who says, “I hear you. I understand what you are trying to do. I’ll help you get there.”
