“A Rumour of Adventure” by Kees Paling

It’s May 1938. Four friends embark upon a spring walk, something various members of their group usually do. This time, since the tradition is England, they choose Somerset. This walk is different from its predecessors; the threat of Germany is hanging over Czechoslovakia, and at least two members of the group still have strong memories of the horrors of the Great War.  

The four are members of the Inklings, a group of Oxford dons and various friends who usually meet twice a week at The Eagle and Child pub in in one of the member’s rooms in Magdalen College. The four are C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. A Rumour of Adventure by Kees Paling is the fictional account of such a walk, which never occurred in that year with those participants (Williams wouldn’t become associated with the Inklings until more than a year later). But this is fiction, a novella or short novel, in fact, so it’s okay to invent.

 

It's a charming and engaging story, true to the teachings, beliefs, and personalities of the four. Paling has done a considerable amount of reading and study to get this as right as he does. And that includes works they wrote and biographies and accounts about them.

 

Kees Paling

Of course, the four don’t just walk; they stop at pubs and drink a lot of beer (and hey drink a lot of beer, except for Williams, who drinks a lot of tea). And they talk. Oh, how they talk. 

Their conversations about literature, writing, the growing threat in Europe, imagination, the faerie folk, and more is the heart of the story, and this is what makes the account so true to the real people. And while Tolkien in particular likes his adventures in oral and written stories only, the four will experience an adventure or two along the way. While it’s tempting to compare, the adventures bear almost no similarity to that of the four hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. Note that I said “almost.”

 

Paling has published several books in Dutch on subject ranging from the fall of Prussia and culture on the eve of the new millennium to learning problems in children. He’s contributed to several books on communication and published a rather vast number of newspaper articles. He received a degree in sociology from Utrecht University, served as a lieutenant and counsellor at the Dutch Royal Military Academy, and worked at the Dutch Ministry of Culture and Netherlands Institute for Social Research. He serves as a communication consultant for the Dutch government.

 

A Rumour of Adventure is a delightful story of four men who were good friends and companions in writing (it was Lewis who so strongly encouraged Tolkien to writ The Hobbit and the work that Tolkien called “The New Hobbit”). As the story makes clear, they were also teachers, great conversationalists, and beer drinkers (lots of beer). 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Does America Still Do Federalism? – Tony Woodlief at Law & Liberty.

 

Cui Bono? – Alan Jacob at The Homebound Symphony.

 

Notes on the Great Vibe Shift – Ian Leslie at The Ruffian.

 

Is Atlas Shrugged the New Vibe? – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Shrouded Veterans: The Untold Struggles of an Iowa Colonel’s Widow – Frank Jastrzembski at Emerging Civil War.

“The Fellowship” by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski

They didn’t achieve the literary fame of some of their contemporaries – James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges or T.S. Eliot. They sat in rooms at Magdalen College and The Eagle & Child pub in Oxford and debated, discussed, reads works in progress to each other, critiqued each other, argued, laughed and drank. They were academics and they were Christians, although some had professional lives outside the university and not all of them had what we might call orthodox Christian faith.

But their influence was huge, even in their lifetimes, and it has only grown since their deaths.

In The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski tell the literary story of the four men who were the main Inklings – C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. The work is filled with their biographical information, but it is more about their thought and ideas, their books, their lectures and influences. And their faith, and not only what they believed but how they believed.

I don’t think I’ve ever used an exclamation point in a book review, but I am now. What a marvelous book this is!

The Zaleskis have undertaken an enormous amount of research and closely read all of Inklings works, major and minor. Their gift is how well they tell this story, deeply sustaining interest for more than 500 pages (and add 73 pages of notes and a 23-page bibliography). The idea for this book, they write, started in the 1980s, with phone calls and letters from the last of four alive, Owen Barfield, to a young writer named Philip Zaleski.

We learn not only about the impact of the writings most familiar today – Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and his Christian apologetic works like The Screwtape Letters – but also how each made major contributions in their academic disciplines. We see the long decades of struggle that Barfield experienced – with most of his career spent as an attorney while his heart was in literary studies. And we understand the contribution of Charles Williams, best known for a book about the Holy Spirit (The Descent of the Dove) but also the author of seven of the strangest novels you are ever likely to read. Williams also had a major impact on the writings of C.S. Lewis.

What’s particularly powerful is how the Zelskis consider each of the four Inklings – and the reader gets warts and all. These were men, men with Christian faith to be sure but also men with human frailties. By giving us a complete picture, we are better able to grasp the impact each of the four had.

Bonus: The Fellowship contains one of the best analyses of The Lord of the Rings I’ve ever come across.

Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski are co-authors of Prayer: A History (2006) and co-editors of The Book of Heaven (2000). He is also co-author of Gifts of the Spirit (2009) and editor of the annual editions of the Best Spiritual Writing and Best American Spiritual Writing. Carol is the author of Other World Journeys (1988) and The Life of the World to Come (1996) and a professor of World Religions at Smith College and a columnist for The Christian Century.

If you’re interested in Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, The Fellowship is a wonderful guide to their writings. If you’ve ever wondered where the Harry Potter books came from or why The Game of Thrones made it to television this book will help provide an explanation.

Or if you simply want to know who were some of the major Christian thinkers of the 20^th century, who thought about Christianity in the context of learning, academics, history, philology, literary studies, and life, then The Fellowship will serve as a fine introduction.

Top photograph (composite of, clockwise from upper left, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield) – aslanchristianbooks.co.uk.

The Poetry of the Accidental Inkling

T.S. Eliot called him England’s greatest living poet, and described his novels as “supernatural thrillers.” He was responsible for the first major translation of the writings of Soren Kierkegaard into English. He wrote plays, criticism, and essays. And he was a major influence on at least one of C.S. Lewis’s novels.

Charles Williams (1888-1945) is mostly remembered today as an “accidental” Inkling, the group of Oxford dons who met at the Eagle and Child Pub and included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He was something of a wartime refugee – an editor of Oxford University Press in London, he moved (with the publisher) to Oxford during the blitz of World War II. He met Lewis, and Lewis drew him into the Inklings. (Lewis was a fan; Tolkien wasn’t, at least according to one source).

I first encountered his writings in the early 1980s. Eerdman’s published new editions of seven of his novels – Descent into Hell, The Place of the Lion, Shadows of Ecstasy, Many Dimensions, The Greater Trumps, War in Heaven and All Hallow’s Eve. They are clearly Christian fiction – but almost unrecognizable from what we know as Christian fiction today. The seven are complex works; they must be read slowly to grasp what is happening in the stories. Eliot’s “supernatural thrillers” gets at some of what they’re about; “supernatural thriller, mystery, theology philosophy, cultural commentary” may be a bit closer but still doesn’t adequately describe this extraordinary books.

Williams also wrote poetry, and three of his collections were republished in 2007 by the Apocryphile Press as part of their Inkling Heritage Series: The Silver Stair (1912), Poems of Conformity (1917), and Windows of Night (1925). The works are largely formal, rather classical poetry, with recognizable forms, rhyming schemes, and meter.

The Silver Stair includes a significant number of love poems, love toward women as well as the Virgin Mary. Poems of Conformity is a collection of theological poems, but that’s a generalization; there are other subjects and themes, too. Windows of Night is a more general collection, and includes a number of beautiful sonnets.

There is whimsy here as well, and fun, humor and laughter. One free verse poem in Windows of Night is a particular favorite:

On Meeting Shakespeare

I saw Shakespeare

In a Tube station on the Central London:

He was smoking a pipe,

He had Sax Rohmer’s best novel under his arm

(In a cheap edition),

And the Evening News.

He was reading in the half-detached way one does.

He had just come in from an office

And the notes for The Merchant

Were in his pocket,

Beginning (it was the first line he thought of)

‘Stil quiring to the young-eyed cherubins,’

But his chief wish was to be earning more money.

(Sax Rohmer is largely forgotten today, but he was the author of the Fu Manchu stories extraordinarily popular in the 1920s.) 

Not all of the poems in these volumes are as accessible as “On Meeting Shakespeare;” many anticipate the complexity of his novels written in the 1930s and 1940s. But together they are a piece of literary significance. Not every writer can claim to have influenced both T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis.

Related: Yes, there is a Charles Williams Society, based (where else?) in the United Kingdom.