own book will be 15/-, so if you can sell it it will be 15/-clear! I am sick of proof correcting which has had to go on concurrently with all my other work this whole term.10
Our visitors, thank God, are gone. They have left Minto very worn out but not, so far as I can see, actually ill.
We have had such a severe winter that even I, with all my polar bear instincts am tired of it. But the snow drops are up now and we have had one or two of those very early fine days which excite me more than the real spring. You know—that thin, tingling, virginal weather.
Most of Sibelius’ symphonies are recorded and are glorious. I agree with you about the Old Curiosity Shop11—one of the most homely and friendly of all Dickens. With love to you all.
Yours
Jack
Since the early 1930s a group of Christian friends had been meeting in Lewis’s Magdalen College rooms every Thursday evening to talk and usually to read aloud whatever they might be writing. The group had its origins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s weekly visits to Lewis’s rooms in 1929 where he read aloud his stories of Middle-Earth. Shortly afterwards, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–74),12 a brilliant young student and one of Lewis’s pupils, founded a society of undergraduates and dons who met in his rooms to read unpublished manuscripts aloud, after which there would be comments and criticism. Lewis and Tolkien both became members. Lean christened the group ‘The Inklings’—suggesting someone who dabbles in ink. The club founded by Lean died when he took his degree and left Oxford. But, wrote Professor Tolkien,
Its name was transferred (by C.S.L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C.S.L., and met in his rooms in Magdalen. Although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into bang at this time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not. C.S.L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.13
By 1936 this informal group included Lewis, Tolkien, Warnie Lewis, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil,14 Dr Robert E. Havard15 and Charles Wrenn.16 Besides the Thursday meetings in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, they met on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub. Lewis’s next letter was to a man he was keen to introduce to these friends.
TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W): 17
[Magdalen College]
March 11th 1936
[Dear Mr Williams,]
I never know about writing to an author. If you are older than I, I don’t want to seem impertinent: if you are younger, I don’t want to seem patronizing. But I feel I must risk it.
A book sometimes crosses ones path which is so like the sound of ones native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer. I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris. There are layers and layers—first the pleasure that any good fantasy gives me: then, what is rarely (tho’ not so very rarely) combined with this, the pleasure of a real philosophical and theological stimulus: thirdly, characters: fourthly, what I neither expected nor desired, substantial edification.
I mean the latter with perfect seriousness. I know Damaris very well: in fact I was in course of becoming Damaris (but you have pulled me up). That pterodactyl…I know all about him: and wanting not Peace, but (faugh!) ‘peace for my work’. Not only is your diagnosis good: but the very way in which you force one to look at the matter is itself the beginning of a cure. Honestly, I didn’t think there was anyone now alive in England who could do it.
Coghill of Exeter put me on to the book: I have put on Tolkien (the Professor of Anglo Saxon and a papist) and my brother. So there are three dons and one soldier all buzzing with excited admiration. We have a sort of informal club called the Inklings: the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity. Can you come down some day next term (preferably not Sat. or Sunday), spend the night as my guest in College, eat with us at a chop house, and talk with us till the small hours. Meantime, a thousand thanks.
[C. S. Lewis]
On 12 March Charles Williams wrote to Lewis from Oxford University Press, Amen House, London:
My dear Mr Lewis, If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day.
To be exact, i finished on Saturday looking—too hastily—at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem. had been asked to write something about it for travellers and booksellers and people so I read it first…I admit that I fell for the Allegorical Love Poem so heavily because it is an aspect of the subject with which my mind has always been playing; indeed I once wrote a little book called An Essay in Romantic Theology, which the Bishop of Oxford (between ourselves) shook his head over. So Amen House did not publish it, and I quite agree now that it was a good thing. For it was very young and rhetorical. But I still toy with the notion of doing something on the subject, and I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means. I know there is Coventry Patmore, but he rather left the identity to be deduced.
After vacillating a good deal I permit myself to believe in your letter and in the interests of the subject so far as to send you a copy of one of my early books of verse,18 because the Poems from page 42—page 81 may interest you…
You must be in London sometimes. Do let me know and come and have lunch or dinner…I should like very much to come to Oxford as you suggest; the only thing is that I am a little uncertain about next term because I may be at Canterbury off and on to see the rehearsals of the Play19 I have written for the Friends of the Cathedral to do in June…You will conceive Cranmer as coming under a similar danger to that from which Damaris was saved by the Mercy. Do forgive this too long letter, but after all to write about your Love Poem and my Lion and both our Romantic Theology in one letter takes some paragraphs…P.S.2. And I am 49-so you can decide whether that is too old or too young.20
TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):
[Magdalen College]
March 23rd 1936
[Dear Williams,]
This is going to be a complicated matter. To make a clean breast of it, that particular species of romanticism which you found in my book and which is expressed in the poems21 you send me, is not my