Thursday Night

In the circle of Oxford writers known as the “Inklings,” friendship was a boon to art.

The pandemic has made our family territorial. With businesses suddenly shuttered last March, with schools shunting between in-person and remote learning in the year since, the seven of us have scrambled for space. Privacy has been counted among the losses of the global catastrophe. 

As a writer, I’ve done most of my work behind closed doors. It’s true that most of us conceive of creativity as a solitary act, forbidding interruption. Author and essayist Joan Didion has written that while the writer’s job is easy, the conditions are not. “You have to be alone to do this.” 

We often imagine our painters, our novelists, our composers, our screenplay writers getting their work done to the extent they’re left to themselves. But in her book, The Company They Keep, Diana Glyer reconsiders these common (and historically new) assumptions about creativity. Before the Renaissance, Glyer notes, an artist, under the spell of the muse, was said to “have” a genius. Only in the last several hundred years have we come to understand “genius” as representative of the artist’s identity: she “is” a genius. In examining the group of Oxford writers called the Inklings, a writing group including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield, Glyer arrives at a far more collaborative, more Christian vision of the creative life. As Glyer would say, “genius” is produced by a life together.

The Inklings launched inauspiciously in 1929 when C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, faculty colleagues at Oxford, began to read and critique each other’s work. Slowly, the twosome added members: Lewis’s brother, Warren; Lewis’s university friend, Owen Barfield; Tolkien’s son, Christopher (among some fourteen others eventually). Although the group never formalized their purpose, they loosely understood the qualifications for membership as, in the words of Charles Williams, “a tendency to write, and Christianity.” 

The men met Thursday nights in Lewis’s smoky rooms at Magdalen College, as Glyer recounts. According to Warren Lewis, the ritual was “unvarying.” The men read aloud work in progress, offering to each other both hearty encouragement as well as criticism. Works that Christians have come to treasure—C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy—took shape in the company of these friendships. “We were no mutual admiration society,” Warren Lewis defended. “Praise for good work was unstinted, but censure for bad work—or even not-so-good work—was brutally frank.” Hugo Dyson, in particular, dreaded Tolkien’s readings from The Lord of the Rings: “Oh, God. No more Elves!”

Early Inklings scholars characterized the group (unfairly, according to the Lewis brothers) by their insularity. In these early estimations, Inklings’ mutual influence was conformist, almost conspiratorial. C.S. Lewis published a formal rebuttal to one such exaggerated biographical take in John Wain’s 1962 Sprightly Running: “[The author] has mistaken purely personal relationships for alliances.” The Inklings loudly insisted they were too creatively stubborn—and perhaps too literarily high-minded—to entirely satisfy the criticism of other group members. Tolkien was nearly ceaselessly revising, though never abandoning his Hobbit tales, much to Dyson’s chagrin. Lewis, on the other hand, refused to revise any of his Narnia tales, even to the point of publishing contradictory material.

But given the regularity of their meetings, the volume of work read, and the shared commitment to mutual critique and encouragement, Glyer argues it’s impossible to imagine these men not having influenced each other. Relying on a more expansive definition of influence (from Karen Burke LeFevre’s Invention as a Social Act), she cites examples of material influence, such as editorial changes to manuscripts. She also cites more immaterial influence: as members anticipated writing for a familiar crowd and relied upon the accountability a writing group provides. According to Glyer, many Inklings’ works might have been abandoned had it not been for the regular summoning of their Thursday night meetings. As Tolkien explained: “[C.S. Lewis] 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 have never brought [The Lord of the Rings] to a conclusion.” Friendship was a boon to art.

Diana Glyer’s The Company They Keep is not the biographically immersive narrative that The Fellowship, another book about the Inklings, is. It is not the book with which to begin for readers unfamiliar with these writers. At times, it reads densely with Inklings arcana. Nevertheless, Glyer’s central argument is a helpful corrective to our hyper-individualist assumptions: we privilege originality to our own creative detriment. “Creativity thrives in community,” she concludes. “This is true of the Inklings. It is also characteristic, to a greater or less extent, of all collaborative circles, including clusters of scientists, journalists, politicians, educators, social reformers, and engineers.” We discover our best ideas—for social policy, for art, for city planning, for technology—in the company of others.

There’s no doubt that writing and other creative disciplines require solitary hours. Books and poems, screenplays and sculptures take shape, at least initially, in the company of one. In this way, creative work can sometimes feel like suffering. Still, Glyer’s vision invites us to embrace a different kind of generative “genius” and creative work. Work that looks like animated conversation. Work that might even look like corporate prayer. In fact, maybe work isn’t the best word to describe what happens in the company of creative friends. Maybe we could simply call it Thursday night.

The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Glyer (Kent State University Press, 2008)

Text: Jen Michel

Photography: Rebekah Stringer