I was amused to read that Tolkien made the mistake of bringing along the historian Gwyn Jones one evening, and it got a little awkward, though Jones proved acceptable).Īuthor Glyer has done a tremendous job going carefully through old manuscripts and notes in various collections, looking for evidences of revision, and correlating them with reports of the Inklings meetings. They read their work to each other and boldly critiqued it, in a cloud of tobacco smoke in Lewis’ shabby rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford (the famous Tuesday meetings at the Eagle and Child pub were purely social, and guests were permitted, which was not true of the Thursday nights at Magdalen. Jack Lewis did – with great enthusiasm – and gradually they gathered about them a small community of fellow writers of like mind. She follows the Inklings’ history from its beginning when Tolkien – very shyly and with trepidation – showed a poem to his new friend Jack, taking a chance that he’d be the kind of person who’d appreciate it. Its purpose is to analyze the ways in which the Inklings group, which lasted 17 years (quite an achievement for any writers’ group) served as a catalyst for its members’ creativity. But this book wasn’t really intended to convey biographical information (though it’s as good an introduction as any for the curious). Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings. So I didn’t learn a lot of new things from Diana Pavlac Glyer’s Bandersnatch: C.

If someone writes a new book with fresh information, somebody is pretty likely to tell me about it, in a discussion group or in a review in the Bulletin of the New York C. I’ve read several, but far from all of them, and I feel no obligation to. I have a similar attitude to books about C. “If anything really important happens,” he said, “someone is bound to tell you about it.” While Tolkien wrote things out in order to discover what he wanted to say, Lewis tended to mull things over before committing anything to paper.Īccording to a well-known anecdote, C. Lewis’s writing process was quite different from Tolkien’s.

Bandersnatch by Diana Pavlac Glyer