The Inklings Gathered
The Inklings were prolific writers: they left fingerprints on hundreds of documents, thousands of pages of manuscripts, letters, and diary entries. In sifting through it all, looking for clues, what we find are fragments—a quick note in a margin, an offhand remark in a letter. And we are left to fill in the gaps as best we can.
But even if it were possible to track down every last scrap of written evidence, we still wouldn’t have the whole picture. What’s missing? The text of their ongoing conversations, the comments, questions, and suggestions they made as they talked with one another, casually and constantly, as they went about their days. What new ideas emerged as they walked the streets of Oxford? What random remark lodged in the memory and changed the whole direction of a novel? What project, started by one of them, sparked a chain reaction of inspiration for another member of the group?
Their words, written and spoken, form a complicated web of influences and serve as an outward and visible expression of lives lived in community. As we have seen, the Inklings provided inspiration to start new projects; offered support in times of confusion; shaped the direction of one another’s stories; criticized drafts so severely that books were abandoned; changed what they wrote in anticipation of the group’s response; initiated competition that spurred their productivity; edited ragged rough drafts and polished finished ones; worked together to produce joint projects; created fictionalized characters based upon one another; wrote poems about each other; reviewed each other’s books; and quoted one another constantly, giving variety and substance to their work. They learned a great deal from one another, down to their most fundamental beliefs, concepts, and ideas.
Their creative interaction helps us understand these men and appreciate their work. And their experiences point to a much larger truth: creativity thrives in community.
Genius
There is something rare and special about the interaction of the Inklings; and yet, this kind of creative collaborating is common among writers, artists, and inventors—much more common than most people think. There are two very different ways of picturing the process of creating something new. There is the old-school way: a brilliant but misunderstood genius forges a path, overcomes challenges, and stands triumphant. Think of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, or William Shakespeare, pen in hand, contemplating the blank page. Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb. Thomas Wolfe, typing out page after page of Look Homeward, Angel.
Joshua Wolf Shenk has written extensively about creative partnerships. He argues that this “lone-genius idea” has become our dominant view. But Shenk quickly points out the problem with this way of looking at creative genius: it isn’t true.
Michelangelo? He was the center of a group of 14 artists who painted that ceiling. As his biographer William E. Wallace points out, Michelangelo was not only an artist, he was also “the head of a good sized entrepreneurial enterprise that collaboratively made art that bore his name (an opinion piece by Wallace in the New York Times was aptly headlined ‘Michelangelo, CEO’).” Shakespeare wrote his plays while standing on the stage as an actor among actors; Edison’s real innovation was designing the first industrial lab where employees carried out research and development, often working side by side all night long; Thomas Wolfe struggled until Maxwell Perkins came alongside and convinced him to cut 90,000 words from his first novel.
A very different way of viewing the creative process has been gaining ground. Innovation thrives in “the courts of sixteenth-century Florence, say, or the coffee shops of Enlightenment London, or the campus of Pixar.” Or a little pub in Oxford called The Eagle and Child. Ideas arise in conversation. Projects emerge when two strong personalities argue, and then, intrigued by new possibilities, agree to work together. A quiet suggestion leads to a whole new point of view. Caustic critique gives rise to a different vision altogether. Two inventions by two different creators take shape along parallel lines, enhancing both. An idea contributed by someone from an entirely different discipline proves the key to breakthrough. Collaborators combine knowledge and experience from wildly different sources, providing needed information that others do not (and could not) know.
More and more, normal creativity starts to look a lot less like a lone genius struck with a single breathtaking insight and a whole lot more like a series of sparks coming from different directions, each spark inspiring something new.
Good Company
When you begin to talk about this kind of interaction and how it enhances productivity and creativity, some critics get uneasy. What about individual talent? Or the painstaking mastery of one’s craft? What about those long hours of individual work: the writer at her desk or the drafter at his table? And the solitude and reflection necessary to cultivate deep roots, establishing far-flung dreams on solid ground?
It is true that personal innovation can be enhanced by community. It is also true that a great group depends upon the contributions of great people. We won’t get ahead if we simply replace the idea of the bold individual with the idea of the collaborative collective. We need to start thinking bigger. We affirm both.
On the one hand, we notice how often individual talent is enhanced by creative connections. On the other hand, we also pay close attention to the ways healthy connections provide the correction, challenge, and example that enhance the individual talent.
We take a bigger perspective. We take risks and discover how conversation, friendship, collaboration, even conflict and correction, make individual talent better and ordinary work extraordinary. In some ways, this book might be read as an encouragement to rethink the process of invention by stepping back, looking again, and noticing what else is inside the frame when you consider a wider context.
Working out the balance between time alone and time together will vary. So will the relative proportions—silence and companionship, praise and criticism, suggestions and questions. Striking the right balance will be different for different people. It will be constantly adjusted for different projects and change throughout the seasons of a person’s life.
That said, connecting with others remains an important component of what it means to be a successful inventor. It should not be ignored. Charles Williams observed, “Much was possible to a man in solitude. … But some things were possible only to a man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly.”
Randy Komisar is a businessman who has been experimenting with putting this kind of larger perspective into practice. He has shifted his work ethic away from efficiency thinking and has focused instead on what he calls relational thinking. According to Forbes, in every major decision, Komisar keeps one goal in mind: to surround himself with “the smartest, most high-integrity people.” His first priority used to be racing to get the job done. Now it has become “building deep, long-term, win-win relationships.”
Komisar says that as a result, he is more productive. Not only that: he is also much happier. All in all, this emphasis on relational thinking has served him well. The Forbes article encourages us to consider shifting our approach, too, since doing so can have “a huge impact on our behaviors, well-being, income, happiness, even longevity.” And, I would add, doing so can have a huge impact on the innovative and creative work we do.
The scholarly world is also wrestling with the implications of this notion. Karen Burke LeFevre has published some of the earliest and most significant scholarly work on writing as a social process. She offers the following illustration. It is a word picture that is not only a powerful metaphor for the creative process but also might be taken as the theme of this book: “There will always be great need for individual initiative, but no matter how inventive an individual wants to be, he will be influenced for better or for worse by the intellectual company he keeps. On top of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont, there are thirty-year-old trees that are only three feet tall. If a tree begins to grow taller, extending beyond the protection of the others, it dies.”
She concludes with this compelling advice: “Plant yourself in a tall forest if you hope to have ideas of stature.” That is exactly what the Inklings did. There is much to be said about the good that can come from the company we keep.
Catching That Bandersnatch
Thinking more generously about creativity and influence invites us to step back and take one more look at that infamous bandersnatch comment. The common way to think about Tolkien, Lewis, and their mutual influence is sometimes based on a narrow view, a limited perspective, one short line that reads “No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.”
But what happens if we take a step back and look again? Here is the larger context of what Lewis said about how the Inklings influenced Tolkien and his work:
No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch. We listened to his work, but could affect it only by encouragement. He has only two reactions to criticism; either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all.
Lewis says, “No one ever influenced Tolkien,” but his comment is immediately qualified. The Inklings influenced Tolkien’s work, he says, and they did it primarily by listening and encouraging. And as we have seen in these pages, listening and encouraging are neither passive activities nor insignificant ones.
What about criticism? Lewis says Tolkien would react one of two ways.
Sometimes, he would begin the work over again from the beginning. Starting over? That represents major influence, indeed.
At other times, Lewis says, Tolkien took “no notice at all.” This may be true. Tolkien may have simply ignored the advice that didn’t suit him. But I think Lewis may be missing something. There is every indication that when the others offered suggestions, Tolkien got quiet and jotted a few notes to himself. Then later, after he went home, he fiddled with the text, thought some more about it, and revised his story. And it seems to me, based on the written evidence, that this happened far more than Lewis ever realized. Like a mythical bandersnatch, his imagination would balk and bolt with a mind of its own. But this more complex picture is far different from the claim that the encouragement, opposition, and suggestions of others made no difference at all. There is a whole lot more going on. We must expand our point of view.
Widening Circles
We’ve been considering some of the ways creative people interact with their contemporaries. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe suggests that we expand the idea of creative collaboration even further, to include the contributions of those who lived in the past. Goethe asks, “Do not all the achievements of a poet’s predecessors and contemporaries rightfully belong to him? Why should he shrink from picking flowers where he finds them? Only by making the riches of the others our own do we bring anything great into being.” Writers read other authors. Musicians listen with care to the work of other composers. Managers study other leadership styles, including those from different time periods and other cultures. Scientists build upon other discoveries. Painters find their work enhanced as they grow in appreciation of the painters who have gone before them.
This is not an invitation to slavish imitation or thinly veiled plagiarism. Goethe is urging us to create something great, and that requires breadth of ideas, depth of thought, and connection with voices beyond our own. He asks us to call to mind the riches of others and then to do the hard work of figuring out how to incorporate them into our own unique vision. Consider the extent to which Lewis, Tolkien, and the other Inklings loved books and read widely, including authors from various time periods and stories written in other languages. Consider Lewis’s exhaustive familiarity with sixteenth-century literature and his immersion in that early historical community of writers and thinkers.
Dorothy L. Sayers describes the process this way: “Poets do not merely pass on the torch in a relay race; they toss the ball to one another, to and fro, across the centuries. Dante would have been different if Virgil had never been, but if Dante had never been we should know Virgil differently; across both their heads Ezekiel calls to Blake, and Milton to Homer.”
Conversations with colleagues. Conversations with those who have gone before. Perhaps the best-known expression of this idea comes from a literary theorist named Kenneth Burke. He compares the act of creative breakthrough to the participation of the individual in a much larger, long-standing, ongoing conversation:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you. … However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still rigorously in progress.
As this description illustrates, the things we say—or make, or write— exist as one part of a much larger context. We borrow from those who have been there before us. We are sharpened and challenged by those who surround us. And then we leave our mark, our legacy, for those who will come long after we have gone.
Across the Expanse
This “conversation of mankind” extends across the centuries. It may also connect two writers who happen to live in the same city. My collaboration with Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Powers of Two, may be useful as an illustration of Burke’s ongoing discussion. Shenk and I have never met. But he read some of my earlier work on collaboration. He called me, and we talked on the phone about creative partnerships, particularly the mutual influence of Lewis and Tolkien. I followed up by quoting him extensively in two public lectures. He then quoted my work in his book. And, here and now, I continue the conversation by quoting him: “Creative work depends on exchanges across an expanse,” writes Shenk. “We make our best work, and live our best lives, by charging into the vast space between ourselves and others.”
Lewis puts it this way: “Spin something out of one’s own head when the world teems with so many noble deeds, wholesome examples, pitiful tragedies, strange adventures, and merry jests which have never yet been set forth quite so well as they deserve?” Then he adds, “Why make things for oneself like the lonely Robinson Crusoe when there is riches all about you to be had for the taking?”
Tolkien also clearly understood this point of view. The true artist does not sit down and dream up something out of nothing; the wise artist understands, even celebrates, the benefits of making connections. Tolkien uses a particularly powerful metaphor as he talks about this complex process. He explains, “One writes … not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.”
Tolkien uses the idea of the “leaf-mould of the mind” again in a letter to a reader about the origin of the names Gamgee and Gondor. Tolkien explains “one’s mind is, of course, stored with a ‘leaf-mould’ of memories (submerged) of names, and these rise up to the surface.” Leaf-mould is wonderful stuff, rich and potent, and no longer recognizable as the thing it once was. Decomposed, recombined, these various raw materials are transformed. They become the soil, as it were, for growing something new.
Elsewhere, Tolkien uses other images to describe what the creative process is like. Out of this rich soil grows what he calls the “Tree of Tales.” All of the stories that have ever been written are part of this one tree, connected to the same trunk, leaves and branches “intricately knotted.”
He also compares this process to a tapestry, an image that implies the work of many hands, all contributing to one enormous work of art. In describing this intricate weaving, he emphasizes that it is unified and seamless, “beyond all skill but that of the elves to unravel.” The fact that each thread is different—different colors, textures, shades of dark and light—underscores the way our differences can strengthen and enhance each other.
Finally, Tolkien uses the image of a cauldron: “Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.”
By selecting these specific images—tree, tapestry, and cauldron— Tolkien emphasizes that each individual creative act is a participant in something much larger than itself. “The powerful play goes on,” as Walt Whitman would say. The mood is striking here. Playfulness. Participation. Generosity. Connectedness.
When I have given lectures about this larger and more interactive view, musicians seem to be the quickest to catch on. Yes, they tell me. That’s how music gets made. Each performance is a dynamic interplay that arises between the performers and the piece of music and then bounces back and forth with the audience as well. Sometimes, I have even heard musicians talk about how they “collaborate” with a particular musical instrument or they play a song according to the way the acoustics change within a particular kind of space.
Filmmakers, too, readily acknowledge that the story unrolling up on the screen is the participation of the actors and the score, the directorial vision alongside the sweat and service of the key grip and gaffer.
LeFevre emphasizes that interacting with others does more than help inventive people to become more effective. Her words are worth repeating: “Certain acts of invention—or certain phases of inventive acts— are best understood if we think of them as being made possible by other people.” In many cases, the presence of resonators, opponents, editors, and collaborators does not merely make a project easier, or lighten the burden, or move things along. Often, these important companions are essential to a project’s existence. It is true of writers in general; it is also true of the Inklings. In short, none of them would have written the same things in the same ways if it had not been for the influence of this group.
Exchange
This image of creative collaboration seems remarkably new: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak tinkering with computers in their garage, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr., fighting for social change, Francis Crick and James Watson uncovering the structure of DNA, John Lennon and Paul McCartney finishing each other’s song lyrics. But creative collaboration is as old as the hills, as old as Story. It is, in fact, older than The Iliad and The Odyssey, even older than Homer himself, an author whose work brings together a vast accumulation of many generations of oral tradition.
The poet Homer is an ideal image. When we go looking for the heart of the creative process, we won’t find it in the gifted individual or in the complex interdependence of creative culture. A synthetic view is required; both are at work. Each individual matters and so does the group. And so does the magic that emerges as new ideas and identities arise when those individuals connect. Composer Michael Lee has tried to explain this to me a dozen times. Here’s the best I can do: Jazz happens when talented individuals gather. Jazz happens when the voice of the group becomes more than the sum of its parts. Jazz happens when the music starts to play the musicians.
Of all the Inklings, Charles Williams probably wrote and taught more about this idea than any of the others. The word “exchange” was a buzzword in Oxford at the time, and he used it to describe what it means to live as members of one another. Williams assumed “the whole cosmos is an organism in which all parts are interrelated, interdependent, co-inhering, matter and spirit, body and soul.”
Thomas Howard offers the following overview of Williams’s theories, especially as they were understood in England in a time of war:
[Williams] realized that the peace and well-being he enjoyed in England were due to the sacrifices being made by the young men in the trenches of France. In other words, everyone in England owed his life to these men who were laying down theirs.
It seemed to Williams that here was a principle. Everyone, all the time, owes his life to others. It is not only in war that this is true. We cannot eat breakfast without being nourished by some life that has been laid down. If our breakfast is cereal or toast, then it is the life of grains of wheat that have gone into the ground and died that we might have food. If it is bacon, then the blood of some pig has been shed for the sake of my nourishment. All day long I live on this basis: some farmer’s labor has produced this wheat and someone else’s has brought it to market and so on. …
Williams coupled this idea of exchange with two other ideas, namely, “substitution” and “co-inherence,” but they all come to the same thing. There is no such thing as life that does not owe itself to the life and labor of someone else. It is true all the way up and down the scale of life, from our conception which owes itself to the self-giving of a man and a woman to each other; through my daily life where I find courtesies such as a door held open if I have a package; … to the highest mystery of all in which a life was laid down so that we might all have eternal life.
Williams saw all of life as interdependent upon the sacrifices and service of others. It is a lofty idea. It has been captured in one of the most beautiful expressions of gratitude found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Designed for use at the end of the day, we pray, “Grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil.”
Studying the Inklings as writers in community helps us to understand them better. It also offers us a more accurate view of the creative process. As a result, we describe the past more accurately, and we think about the present more openly. We also look to the future, and we recognize how encouraging collaboration can lead to creative breakthrough and inspire new generations of writers and artists.
Tolkien illustrates this powerfully in a scene in the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings. As Frodo is wrapping up his estate before leaving the Shire for good, he goes through his papers with Sam Gamgee and hands him his keys. The keys are physical, of course: Sam is the one who will inherit Frodo’s house, along with the rest of Frodo’s belongings.
But another “key” is also passed along. Sam stands in line to inherit something else, something far more important:
There was a big book with plain red leather covers; its tall pages were now almost filled. At the beginning there were many leaves covered with Bilbo’s thin wandering hand; but most of it was written in Frodo’s firm flowing script. It was divided into chapters but Chapter 80 was unfinished, and after that were some blank leaves.
The big book is The Red Book of Westmarch. It was started a generation earlier as a record of Bilbo’s memoirs. At that time, it was called “There and Back Again, a Hobbit’s Holiday.” To these beginning chapters, Frodo has added his own account of the War of the Ring, working collaboratively “with the aid of his friends’ recollections.”
By now, the title page has many titles on it, seven to be exact, each drafted, then reconsidered, then crossed out and revised. Frodo has taken his turn and written and rewritten the title page. Now it looks like this:
THE DOWNFALL
OF THE
LORD OF THE RINGS
AND THE
RETURN OF THE KING(as seen by the Little People; being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire, supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise.) Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell.
Frodo takes the large red book and offers it, a gift, to Sam. Sam looks down at it in wonder. “Why, you have nearly finished it, Mr. Frodo!” he exclaims.
Frodo’s answer is gentle, but certain: “I have quite finished, Sam,” he says.
And then he adds, “The last pages are for you.”
DOING WHAT THEY DID: I sit alone at my desk as I work on these last chapters. And, at the same time, I am remembering something I read in a book from another scholar, I am responding to the comments made by Linda as she marked up the rough draft of this chapter, I am imagining where you might be when your eye lights upon these stories. Sure, the word “collaboration” can be used to describe what happens when two individuals labor together start-to-finish on a single project. But collaboration also involves much larger patterns of participation, patterns that affirm the value of individual talent while at the same time recognizing how much we can benefit from the presence of others at every stage of the work that we do.