Nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur, “No one is known except through friendship,” taken from Augustine, forms the epigraph of The Fellowship. Nihil nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur, “Nothing is known except through friendship,” may be equally true. Lately, scholars have turned their attention to the importance of friendships in the history of twentieth-century Christianity—for instance, Brenna Moore's recent studies of the circle of friends centered around Léon Bloy and including Raïssa and Jacques Maritain and their role in the French Catholic revival.
In The Fellowship, Philip Zaleski, a writer and editor, and Carol Zaleski, professor of world religions at Smith College, trace the history of a group of Christian friends who called themselves the Inklings, an all-male literary circle at Oxford begun in 1933 (but with forerunners) and lasting to some extent into the 1960s. During its peak years, from the mid-1930s to 1949, members would meet in C. S. Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College on Thursday nights to read and discuss works in progress, and on Tuesday mornings in the Eagle and Child pub for food and conversation.
The core of The Fellowship consists of intersecting biographies of the four Inklings who had the most impact on literary and religious history: Lewis (1898–1963), the central and most prolific figure in the group, who receives the most attention; J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), the author of the one major literary classic the circle produced, The Lord of the Rings; novelist and publisher Charles Williams (1886–1945), a strange “figure glimpsed in a fever dream” (221), whose theological insights were highly valued by Lewis; and Owen Barfield (1898–1997), novelist, critic, and barrister. The Zaleskis pay attention to the twists and turns of friendship among the central four, and to other members of the Inklings, notably Lewis's charming, alcoholic brother Warren (Warnie) and the somewhat boorish critic Hugo Dyson. They move outward at times to the friends of Inklings, a group that reached as far as Howard Nemerov and Saul Bellow. Even Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor make cameo appearances.
When we love and trust a friend, we are likely to want to broaden our minds and hearts to see the truth in what that friend believes and to feel the draw of what the friend loves. So for each other, the Inklings provided a welcoming space, a forum in which their creations and ideas could be shared, encouraged, sometimes sharply but charitably (or uncharitably, in the case of Dyson) criticized, and developed. Much divided them. Tolkien, who described himself as a man of limited sympathies, never warmed to the fiction of Lewis or Williams. No other Inklings shared Barfield's enthusiasm for the “anthroposophy” of the German esotericist Rudolf Steiner, nor did any join Williams in his involvement with magic and the occult. But all espoused some form of Christian orthodoxy, and none was at home in the world that gave rise to industrialism and the two world wars. What the Zaleskis say of Lewis could be said of each of the four major figures: “He was convinced that poetry and imaginative literature were a means of keeping alive, by transposing to a new key, the aesthetic and moral sensibilities endangered by a crude scientific positivism” (184–85).
The Fellowship is, for the most part, based in published sources, especially memoirs and collections of letters, on subjects by and about whom much has been published (the “works consulted” bibliography is fourteen pages long), but the Zaleskis have added interviews and archival research of their own. What is new about this book is chiefly the comprehensive view that it takes. But the authors also depart from the received picture in their exploration of the darker side of Williams, including his experiments with magic and ritualized sadism.
The role of occultism/esotericism in twentieth-century Western religious revivals, which extends beyond Williams and Barfield to William James, Gabriel Marcel, and others, deserves further study. But for the Inklings, especially Tolkien and Lewis, a scholarly medievalism was the preferred route to a recovery of transcendence in contrast to the world of scientific materialism. Against the fragmentations of literary modernism, they returned to coherent “archaic literary forms not as an antiquarian curiosity but as a means of squarely addressing modern anxieties and longings” (512). Their common project, the Zaleskis say, quoting the title of Lewis's book on the medieval world-picture, was “to reclaim for contemporary life … the ‘discarded image’ of a universe created, ordered, and shot through with meaning” (510). Did they succeed? How many English-speaking Christians today—how many readers of this review—have been formed in their faith partly through Lewis and Tolkien?
The Zaleskis are consciously writing for an audience broader than scholars alone, and they attempt a lively style that sometimes delivers the mot juste, but sometimes rather less: Perelandra, they say, is “so full of delight in unfallen sensuality that one feels at times that one is bathing nude along with Lewis in Parson's Pleasure” (325)—an experience that, I imagine, many readers would travel some distance to avoid. A chronology would be a great help in any future edition. Though too long for use in the classroom, The Fellowship is nonetheless indispensable for anyone who wishes to teach about one or more of the friends who formed the Inklings.
