The Inklings by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

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The question at the beginning of this chapter was ‘Were the Inklings more than just a group of friends?’ So far it has only received some rather patchy answers. Are we after the wrong fox? Should we not rather ask ‘What sort of friends were they?’

There was nothing particularly unusual in the fact that they gathered together in this way. Oxford has always been peppered with unofficial and semi-official clubs of a similar kind. For example, Tolkien founded a short-lived dining club when he was an undergraduate, and a few years later Hugo Dyson was one of a group of undergraduates who met informally at an Oxford public house to read Elizabethan plays (these meetings, at the Jolly Farmers in Paradise Street, were initiated by Sir Walter Raleigh, the then Professor of English Literature, and were often visited by such literary notables living in the area as T. E. Lawrence, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and John Masefield). Such things were the habit rather than the exception, and in this sense the Inklings were just one more Oxford club.1 Yet they were certainly more than that to Jack Lewis. And one can perhaps begin to see why this was by looking at certain recurring patterns in his life.

As he himself pointed out, his first real friendship was with his brother Warnie, and this friendship was nourished twice, both by the persecution at their preparatory school and by the difficulties of home life in Belfast. ‘We stood foursquare against the common enemy,’ he wrote in his autobiography, adding, ‘I suspect that this pattern, occurring twice and so early in my life, has unduly biased my whole outlook. To this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which “we two” or “we few” (and in a sense “we happy few”) stand together against something stronger and larger.’

His attitude to friendship was also affected by his experience at Malvern when he found that the school was ruled by the unofficial clique of ‘Bloods’. He saw this group as at once highly objectionable and infinitely enviable, and his feelings about it eventually became a fixation. He called such groups ‘Inner Rings’. He wrote, when describing the frequency of such things in society:

There exist two different systems of hierarchies. The one is printed in some little book and anyone can easily read it up. A general is always superior to a colonel and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. It is not constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are several on the border-line.

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