Half Pint with Michele Hogan (“Inkling Candles”)

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David interviews Michele Hogan, founder of Inkling Candles:

Show Notes

“We mustn’t make a sound,” said Polly as they climbed in again behind the cidstern. Because it was such an important occasion they took a candle each (Polly had a good store of these in her cave).

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (Chapter 1)

“Begging your pardon, sir,” he said, “and thanking you very much I’m sure… but I ain’t no sort of a chap for a job like that. I never ‘ad much eddycation, you see.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (Chapter 11)

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?’

… [Jack’s] 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… People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. I believe that in all men’s lives one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring.

Whether or not this really corresponds to most people’s experience of the world, circumstances conspired to embed the idea in Lewis’s mind, for when he came up to Oxford as an undergraduate he found himself in a society where cliques really did play a large part.

‘I have a holy terror of coteries,’ he told his father when describing university life, but really the terror was of not belonging to one himself, and he gradually drew his own coterie around him – men such as Barfield, who shared his taste for traditional art-forms as opposed to modernism.

Then came his fellowship at Magdalen, and his discovery that the college was ruled to a large extent by the unofficial junto of ‘progressives’ under the leadership of Harry Weldon. This really was an Inner Ring, and it inevitably increased Lewis’s determination to gather his own friends around him for protection…

Lewis to a large extent turned his back on his college and concentrated on the English Faculty. Here too he found something of an Inner Ring… the ‘Literature’ camp; and, after at first giving his allegiance to it, Lewis soon broke away and formed his own clique with Tolkien, a clique that actually managed to change the direction of the whole Faculty.

It was to a large extent this clique – Lewis, Tolkien, Coghill and others of like mind – who were the nucleus of the Inklings when that group began to meet…

One day Tolkien, in a letter to his son Christopher, referred to the Inklings as ‘the Lewis seance’, and there was more than an element of truth in this. They were Lewis’s friends: the group gathered round him, and in the end one does not have to look any further than Lewis to see why it came into being. He himself is the fox.

Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings

I am going to do something more oldfashioned than you perhaps expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to issue warnings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial that no one calls them “current affairs.”

… I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only not a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together.

… But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous…

Of all the passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things… It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had.

The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring

“…I would not be he.” I had become a Prig, a High-Brow… Those who defend the schools will, of course, say that these Prigs are the cases which the system failed to cure; they were not kicked, mocked, fagged, flogged, and humiliated enough.

But surely it is equally possible that they are the products of the system? That they were not Prigs at all when they came to their schools but were made Prigs by their first year, as I was?

But surely it is equally possible that they are the products of the system? That they were not Prigs at all when they came to their schools but were made Prigs by their first year, as I was?

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (Chapter 7)

And that is why I cannot give pederasty anything like a first place among the evils of the Coll. There is much hypocrisy on this theme. People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? Because those of us who do not share the vice feel for it a certain nausea, as we do, say, for necrophily?

I think that of very little relevance to moral judgement… We attack this vice not because it is the worst but because it is, by adult standards, the most disreputable and unmentionable, and happens also to be a crime in English law. The World will lead you only to Hell; but sodomy may lead you to jail and create a scandal, and lose you your job. The World, to do it justice, seldom does that.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy

Dear Francine,

I was at three schools (all boarding schools) of which
two were very horrid. I never hated anything as much,
not even the front line trenches in World War I.
Indeed the story is far too horrid to tell anyone of
your age. So glad you like the Narnian books.
With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Letter from C.S. Lewis (24th March 1962)

MONKS: I wonder if in your recollections you could select one from your many meetings with Lewis when something occurred which has been indelibly impressed upon you.

BARFIELD: Yes. Possibly the one I remember best… is that of sitting with Lewis in his garden a few weeks after I came back from Germany. I went there in the first half of 1929, learned German, and was much influenced by German Romanticism – especially the work of Novalis… [Lewis] put the point of view that it was unworthy to want things badly… that the only way out really was to identify yourself with the universe. And I remember I rapped out without thinking, “Nonsense, a man must have his Sehnsucht!” (I also remember his quoting this later in a way that revealed it had sunk in.) I took the point of view that, yes, you ought to be trying to identify yourself with the macrocosm, but that your yearning and wanting things badly was really part of your being…

MONKS: So that was an occasion when you were a considerable influence on Lewis?

BARFIELD: Yes…

MONKS: If you go back to what is of so much interest to people, the Inklings, you also early in your career wrote The Silver Trumpet and of course Tolkien has a tremendous following for his Lord of the Rings cycle. All of this we call Imaginative Literature. Can we think for a moment the distinction between your imagination and Lewis’?

BARFIELD: The Silver Trumpet was written before the Inklings came into being, but in answer to your question, did you read the lecture that I gave at Wheaton College called “Lewis, Truth, and Imagination?”

MONKS: No. You spoke about it there? This difference in your imaginations?

BARFIELD: Yes, in detail.

MONKS: Can you tell us something about it now?

BARIFLED: I said that if someone put a pistol to my head and asked me what was Lewis’ relationship to imagination and gave me sixty seconds to answer him, I would have to say he was in love it, and he was. He liked it so much and valued it so much as an experience of the human soul that he did not want its purity tampered with in any way. If you tried to say that it had anything to do with truth, the discovery of truth, then it would not be imagination. That is what the Great War is about, whether imagination is a vechicle for truth, or whether it is a highly desirable and pleasurable experience of the human soul. He had the very strong feeling that you couldn’t relate it in any way to truth without destroying its essence as imagination. He was in love with it.

MONKS: But wouldn’t that love be somewhat similar to begin in the presence of it or under the influence of it…?

BARFIELD: Yes, he was in Romantic love with it…

MONKS: But…

BARFIELD: But I wanted to marry it.

Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis

But as Barfield was exposed to the theology of the Incarnation, he found his perception of Jesus slowly expanding. Poetry and the beauty of oratorios such as the Messiah also contributed to Barfield’s increasing consciousness, until at last he found himself a “convinced Christian.”

Marjorie Lamp Mead, The Silver Trumpet (Afterword)

Perhaps it’s all rather wild speculation, but I suppose one should keep one’s mind open to possibilities. But the more people I talk to – and there aren’t very many of them nowadays – they seem to feel that something’s got to happen fairly soon, something rather fundamental and spectacular, catastrophic possibly, in the near future; and the more that comes through on the news the more convincing this seems to me to be.

This development of bombing in Japan [there had just been a bomb explosion in the Tokyo Underground] and what they call militias in America, together with the development of new explosives that are very easy to make, easy to transplant and use … If someone can make lethal explosives in a test tube and is not especially concerned to protect his own life, you can’t do anything about it… Is that going to be a kind of axe laid to the root of western civilization? I don’t know… I’m rather glad I’m not a young man, that’s all…

Is that going to be a kind of axe laid to the root of western civilization? I don’t know… I’m rather glad I’m not a young man, that’s all.

Owen Barfield, Romanticism Come Of Age

[Mr. Williams taught]… his son that there were many sides t o every argument, and that it was necessary to understand the elements of reason i n the other point of view as wel l as your own. … Above all he insisted on accuracy, impressing on his son that one should never defend one’s opinions by exaggeration or distortion of the facts…

Humphrey Carpenter, “The Inklings”
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David

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After working as a Software Engineer in England for several years, David moved to the United States in 2008, where he settled in San Diego. Then, in 2020 he married his wife, Marie, and moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin. Together they have a son, Alexander, who is adamant that Narnia should be read publication order.