Thursday Evenings

“Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.”

— Malachi 3:16, KJV

The Inklings

Some time in the early 1930s, a small group of friends began to meet in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen on Thursday evenings. Nobody planned it. The name was borrowed from an undergraduate literary club at University College that had invited Tolkien and Lewis to some of its meetings; when the club died, the name passed to the friends. It was a pun, Tolkien later explained, on people with vague ideas and on people who dabbled in ink. They called themselves the Inklings.

The membership shifted over the years, but its core was always Lewis, his brother Warnie and Tolkien. Others came often: Hugo Dyson, when he was in Oxford; Owen Barfield, when he could get away from his London law practice; Nevill Coghill; a doctor named Robert Havard, who looked after Lewis’s health and that of his household and whom the others called Humphrey; Adam Fox, the dean of divinity at Magdalen; and, later, Tolkien’s son Christopher and others. They were all men, nearly all Christians, and nearly all scholars or writers. Most of them were, in one way or another, at odds with the fashions of the literary world of their day.

The pattern was simple. On Thursday nights, after dinner, they gathered in Lewis’s sitting room. Warnie made tea. Someone produced a manuscript and read from it aloud: a chapter, a poem, a paper. The others criticised it, sometimes kindly and sometimes savagely. Then the talk ranged wherever it went, often until late at night. On Tuesday mornings, or later Monday mornings, a group of the same friends met for an hour or so in a pub on St Giles called the Eagle and Child, which they called the Bird and Baby. There they talked and drank beer and did not read manuscripts.

What Was Read There

An enormous amount of twentieth-century literature was first heard in those rooms. Tolkien read most of The Lord of the Rings to the Inklings, chapter by chapter, over more than a decade. Lewis read his own novels, his books of theology, and some of the letters of a senior devil. Warnie read his chapters on the court of Louis XIV. Charles Williams read his poems and his novels. Lewis was the group’s centre. It was his rooms they met in, his enthusiasm that drove them, his voice that dominated the talk. Tolkien said more than once that without Lewis’s encouragement he would never have finished his great book. Lewis was its first and most devoted reader.

Not everyone was so enthusiastic. Dyson, famously, could not bear Tolkien’s elves and did not hide it. Friendship among the Inklings was robust, and nobody expected to be spared. Lewis valued exactly that. He thought that real friends were people who loved the same truth and were looking at the same thing together, not people who flattered each other. Years later he would write a book in which he described friendship among the loves, and the Thursday evenings at Magdalen were the experience behind that chapter.

Charles Williams

In 1936 Lewis read a novel called The Place of the Lion by an author named Charles Williams, an editor at the Oxford University Press in London. He was so excited by it that he wrote to Williams to say so. By a coincidence that both men enjoyed, Williams had just read the proofs of Lewis’s The Allegory of Love at the press, and had been about to write to Lewis in the same terms. The two letters crossed. A friendship began at once.

Williams was a strange and remarkable man. He came from a poor London family, had left university without a degree, and had worked at the Press since before the First World War. He wrote poetry, plays, theology and a series of what he called spiritual thrillers, novels in which the supernatural breaks into ordinary London life. He had a burning, almost hypnotic personality, and many who met him felt that he lived closer to the unseen world than anyone they knew. He also had an unconventional private life, and in his younger years he had been involved with an occult society, the kind of thing that Lewis normally distrusted. Later scholars have uncovered aspects of his relationships with young women that trouble many readers today, though the Inklings seem to have known little of them.

In September 1939, when war broke out, the Oxford University Press moved its London office to Oxford to escape the expected bombing, and Williams moved with it. For the next six years he was in Oxford, and he became one of the most important figures in Lewis’s life. Lewis arranged for him to lecture in the university, which was an unusual honour for a man without a degree, and his lectures on Milton were a sensation. He came to the Thursday evenings and the Tuesday mornings. He talked theology with Lewis late into the night. He also gave Lewis an idea that would matter to him greatly in the last years of his life: that Christians can, in a real sense, carry one another’s burdens, so that one may bear in love some part of another’s suffering or fear. Williams called it the doctrine of substitution, or coinherence.

15 May 1945

The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. A week later, on Tuesday 15 May, Lewis called at the Radcliffe Infirmary on his way to the usual morning meeting, meaning to leave a book or a message for Charles Williams, who had been taken into hospital a few days before. He was told that Williams had just died after an operation. He was fifty-eight. Lewis went on to the Eagle and Child and told the others.

It was the first great loss of Lewis’s adult life since his father’s death, and it struck him hard. And yet, as he wrote to friends at the time, he found that his faith was strengthened rather than shaken by it. He felt, in a way he could not explain, that Williams was not lost, and that the idea of the next life had become more real to him, not less. Two years later he edited a volume of essays by Williams’s friends, among them Dorothy L. Sayers, Tolkien and Barfield, as a tribute to him.

The Book of Remembrance

The verse at the head of this chapter is from Malachi, the last of the prophets. In a cynical and faithless age, a few people who feared the Lord met and talked together, and God listened, and a book of remembrance was written before him. It is a fine description of the Inklings at their best. They were a handful of Christian friends in a sceptical university, reading their work to one another and talking about the things of God. They were not a church and they were not saints. But God hearkened, and books were written in those rooms that are still being read in a hundred languages.