XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis, rec.arts.books.tolkien, alt.books.reviews   
   XPost: rec.arts.books   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Philip and Carol Zaleski’s The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the   
   Inklings is a mental map, a religious journey, and the biography of a   
   brotherhood. Plenty of distinguished Inklings came and went over the   
   years, padding across the carpets with a Warnie-provided drink in   
   hand, but the Zaleskis zoom in on (and out from) the primary axis of   
   Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, and Barfield, the four among whom the   
   invisible correspondences of thought and affection were strongest.   
   Christians all, these men formed what the Zaleskis call “a perfect   
   compass rose of faith”: Barfield the proto–New Ager, Tolkien the   
   rather prim orthodox Catholic, Lewis the noisy and dogmatically   
   ordinary layman and popular theologian, Williams the ritualistic   
   Anglican with a taste for sorcery.   
      
   “The qualifications … are a tendency to write, and Christianity.” Thus   
   explained Lewis in a letter to Williams in March 1936, inviting him to   
   a session of the “informal club” that had begun convening every   
   Thursday night in his rooms at Oxford’s Magdalen College (and then   
   again, still less formally, at the Eagle & Child pub on Tuesday   
   mornings). The letter was a fan letter; the two men didn’t know each   
   other, but Lewis had found himself compelled to inform Williams that   
   reading his fantasy novel The Place of the Lion—in which comfy England   
   is burst upon by unruly celestial essences—had been “one of the major   
   literary events of my life.” Lewis was an Oxford fellow and tutor in   
   English literature, and a relatively fresh-baked believer: after an   
   arduous wrangle of a conversion, he had arrived at the knowledge of a   
   personal God while sitting in Warnie’s sidecar on a motorcycle ride to   
   Whipsnade Zoo. Williams worked in publishing, wrote feverishly, smoked   
   like a chimney, delivered whirling literary-metaphysical lectures, and   
   indulged in the overheated cultivation of female disciples. (One such   
   pupil, we learn from the Zaleskis, was struck smartly on the bottom   
   with a ruler.) Devoutly churchgoing, he was also of high rank in at   
   least one esoteric mystical order and would make sacred signs while   
   traveling on the London Underground. W. H. Auden thought him nearly a   
   saint. To Lewis’s letter, Williams replied immediately that he had   
   been on the verge of writing to Lewis, in praise of his The Allegory   
   of Love. “It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author   
   of a book while he at the same time was admiring me.” (Not a bad   
   example of the loopy Williams prose style, that.) The serendipity, the   
   crossbeams of appreciation, the ardent encounter at the aesthetic,   
   soon to be spiritual, level—a very Inklings moment.   
      
   Read it akll here:   
      
   https://t.co/aGb8MX3krA   
      
      
   --   
   Steve Hayes   
   Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm   
        http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw   
        http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius   
      
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