When Writers Gather

DEBORAH CROMBIE: The other night at dinner we were talking about the apocryphal story in which Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and L. Ron Hubbard were having drinks somewhere (in my imagination, a hotel bar at an early sci-fi convention) and made an informal bet as to who could invent the best religion--resulting in Stranger in a Strange Land, The Foundation Trilogy, Dune, and Scientology.  This is probably not true (the dates don't work out, for one thing) but if it was, wouldn't that have been a fun conversation to overhear?

Heinlein in 1976

This started me thinking about other groups of well-know writers that gathered regularly. Of course there was the famous (or infamous) Algonquin Round Table in New York, also known as the Vicious Circle for their practical jokes and barbed wit. They met for lunch most days between 1919 and 1929, and although membership varied, included Harpo Marx, Alexander Woolcott, Dorothy Parker, and Charles MacArthur.

left to right, Art Samuels, Charles MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woolcott

Then there was Paris. Who hasn't dreamed of sitting in Les Deux Magots with Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, and the other literary luminaries of the 1920's Lost Generation? (Digging out our copy of Midnight in Paris now...) I would, however, pass on the absinthe!

And that brings me to my personal favorite "writer's group," the Inklings. Between the early 1930s and 1949, a loose group of literary enthusiasts gathered regularly at an Oxford pub called the Eagle and Child (affectionately known as the Bird and Baby.) The group included (but was not limited to) C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and occasionally, Dorothy L. Sayers. 

In college I was obsessed with the Inklings. They were the subject of my senior year directed study paper, and on my first trip to England the year I graduated, this pub in Oxford topped even London on my must-see list.

To have been included in those conversations was my ultimate fantasy--basically, I wanted to be an Inking when I grew up.

REDS and readers, if you could be a fly on the wall at one of these gatherings--or another that I haven't mentioned--which one would you choose?

I wonder if the Internet has done away with this sort of regular and fruitful exchange of work and ideas among writers. Or has it bettered it in other ways? 

(Although we Reds chat on our group email on a daily basis, we're not usually brainstorming plots or solving philosophical dilemmas. Maybe we should!)

Do Women Write Better Than Men?

DEBS:

Okay, ladies and readers, it's a can of worms, but I had to open it.

I know that Mr. VS Naipul and his assertion that men write better than women is last week's news, and that he did not win any friends or readers from fifty percent of the population (and a much greater percentage of book buyers, since women buy a lot more books.)

I also realize that Mr. Naipul (as he strokes his Nobel prize) obviously does not care.

But as I've mulled over it this last week (when I should have been thinking about my plot line) I've come to the conclusion that I do care.

And what really bugs me is not whether men write better than women, or women write better than men, but rather that anyone should make a distinction.

It never occurred to me when I was growing up that I should like books by female authors better than books by male authors, or vice versa. I just liked BOOKS. I read Nancy Drew, but I also read the Hardy Boys. I discovered Golden Age crime fiction through Christie, Allingham, Marsh, and of course, Dorothy Sayers. But at about the same time, I was reading Galsworthy and Delderfield and Winston Graham. And Ian Fleming, although under the covers with a flashlight, as my parents did not consider James Bond "appropriate reading." Funny to imagine now that those books were hot stuff!

And then I discovered CS Lewis and Tolkien and Charles Williams--the Inklings, as they were known, a group of MALE authors who lived and taught in Oxford, and who met regularly at a pub called The Eagle and Child (The Bird and Baby, as it was known) to talk about writing and books and life. If I was envious of anything, it was not that they were men, but that they enjoyed an intellectual camaraderie that seemed beyond my wildest dreams.

So imagine my shock when I realized a good many years later that there were men who bragged about the fact that they had never read a book written by a woman. I was gobsmacked, as the Brits say.

And it occurs to me now that I've never heard a female reader say, much less brag, that they have never read a book written by a man.

Nor do I think that women write better than men. They may write differently--scientists will tell you that women are biologically programmed from birth to pick up emotional cues, which might translate into a deeper insight into character--but that's a gross generalization and I can think of many male writers who create beautifully nuanced and complex characters, male and female. That's what good writers do.

As for the camaraderie I so envied, I think women writers have achieved it--we at Jungle Red are an example, if I may say it.

But my feminist hackles are up, and not just my feminist hackles, my Humanist hackles. How is it that one half of the human race can consider that the other has nothing worthwhile to say?

Isn't it past time that we moved beyond such silliness?

And in the meantime, I'll keep reading.