When Williams was five, he contracted measles and his eyesight deteriorated; distant objects became a blur. He liked to check the time on a certain public clock; now the clock itself disappeared into the myopic fog. Three years later, his father’s sight fell victim to a similar problem; Williams considered it the family malady and called it “the asps of blindness.” Compounding the crisis, Walter’s company went bankrupt. The family was at a loss, until Mary’s ingenuity and courage sprang to life. She withdrew her savings and, with her son, her young daughter, Edith (b. 1889), and her half-blind husband in tow, fled to St. Albans, a tranquil village in Hertfordshire, in the hope that clean country air would restore her husband’s vision or at least prevent further decay. She secured lodgings, set up a household, and opened, in the center of town, a stationery and art shop that she called the Art Depot. This was the new world in which Williams would come to maturity.
St. Albans had much to offer: clean streets, friendly neighbors, nearby woods, bits of Roman ruins, and, a godsend to Charles, a medieval abbey with a cathedral church, the second longest in England, with Norman and Gothic arches, a crossing tower, and the tombs of abbots and saints. Here Williams’s religious and romantic longings flowered. His reading expanded to include the adventures of Anthony Hope and Alexandre Dumas and books on knights and chivalry, along with more sobering work like The Scarlet Letter. He attended Matins and Evensong on Sundays and, after being confirmed at fifteen, frequently received the Eucharist, although never at a Tolkienesque pace. His imagination, however, attained a Lewisian pitch, but instead of the animal fantasies of Boxen, he and a friend by the name of George Robinson spun elaborate theatrics, “a sort of running drama” inspired by The Prisoner of Zenda. He and George attended St. Albans Grammar School, adjacent to the Abbey, a venerable public school founded in 948 that counted among its alumni the only English pope, Adrian IV (c. 1100–59). Here, heightening his growing interest in history, Williams performed in class pageants based upon St. Albans’s medieval past. “Most of the boys tolerated the whole affair, some loathed it but Charles … loved it,” remembered George. One gets the sense of an antiquarian in the making: nearsighted, devouring tales of derring-do, seeking exultation in distant times and places. Like other boys who live in the past or in their minds, he abhorred sports. He had, in addition to bad eyesight, a second disability: his hands shook, often uncontrollably, a lifelong affliction brought on by childhood measles or family tensions—the shop never brought in quite enough money—or by the storms that rage in every adolescent and that, in Williams, found no outlet; the tremors left him unable to take up a musical instrument, or shoot or fish, or indulge in other boyish hobbies. Instead, he passed his spare time dreaming, reading, and writing poetry. He might have ended up a narrow-minded scholar or a timid dreamer, in retreat from life, but for the influence of his nearly blind father. For Walter, largely unfit for work, began to take his boy on long country rambles, sometimes twenty miles at a time, while discoursing about poetry, language, art, and faith, imparting, as Williams put it in a poem, “all the good I knew.” The father was able finally to be the father, and the son soaked in his lessons, including a love of walking that never left him.
His childhood over, Williams walked, myopically, into adulthood. Lacking clear ambitions, he enrolled in University College London, commuting daily between St. Albans and St. Pancras, taking courses in French, Latin, mathematics, and literature. After two years the family coffers emptied, and he left to attempt the civil service exam. Through lack of caring or lack of preparation—certainly not lack of intelligence—he failed. Boxed into a corner, he took a job as a packer at the Methodist Bookroom, a dead-end position, but at the same time showed the good sense to enroll in the Working Men’s College. Here he befriended Fred Page, editor at the London offices of Oxford University Press, who was preparing for publication a seventeen-volume edition of Thackeray. Page knew thwarted intelligence when he saw it, recognized that his new friend was wasted as a packer, and offered him a job. On June 9, 1908, Williams went to work in the “Paper, Printing, and Proof-Reading” department of OUP at Amen Corner—later Amen House—in Paternoster Row.
Williams took immediately to his new environs; his tiny office, shared with Fred Page, overlooked central London, and he thought that he was now in the center of the world. He was, at least, in one of the centers of the publishing world. Oxford University Press, founded in 1478, was by the early twentieth century the largest of all university presses, with headquarters in London and Oxford and branch offices in place or soon to be established in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. A few years after Williams arrived, the energetic, creative, and ambitious Humphrey Sumner Milford (1877–1952) became publisher. This proved a godsend for Williams, for Milford had a knack for taking successful risks not only with literary projects (for example, publishing Gerard Manley Hopkins when many critics considered his poems unintelligible) but with his editorial staff. He kept Williams on a very loose leash, expanded his responsibilities, and hired a handful of other eccentric, imaginative figures, including Hopkins’s nephew, a brilliant translator also named, confusingly, Gerard Hopkins. The younger Hopkins later wrote that “[Williams’s] affection for the Oxford University Press was, to no small extent, the moving force of his life. It shared, it symbolized, the fervent religious faith and the happy domestic love which rounded his existence. The City of God in which he never ceased to dwell, contained Amen House as its noblest human monument, and all who lived and worked in it were citizens with him.”
Florence … or Michal
Williams had found his lifelong employment; he stayed at OUP until his death in 1945. He also found, in that same wonderful year of 1908, his lifelong companion, Florence Conway, daughter of a St. Albans ironmonger. The two met at a Christmas gala. “For the first five minutes,” said Florence, “I thought him the most silent, withdrawn young man I had ever met. For the next five minutes I thought him the nicest young man I had ever met. For the rest of the evening I thought him the most talkative young man I had ever met, and still the nicest…” Silent and talkative, withdrawn and nice: the oppositions warring in Williams were no secret to Florence. She understood abnormal psychology, for, according to those who knew her later in life, she possessed one herself. The novelist and memoirist Lois Lang-Sims, who met Florence only after Charles’s death, wrote that “I used to say that, with one exception, Charles was the strangest human being I had ever met in my life: the one exception was Michal [Charles’s private name for Florence]. Michal, in different moods, could display the passions of a maenad and the cool detachment of a sphinx … One could be her dearest friend one day, and twenty four hours later find oneself being scathed by her contempt.” To the poet and critic Glen Cavaliero, who knew her from 1954 until 1970, Florence’s “attitude to her husband could vary almost painfully”; sometimes she described Charles as “shining and lovely in his morning time,” while at other times, Cavaliero reports, she wrote of having “married a cross.”
This, of course, is Florence after Williams’s death. It may be that she was simpler, less fractured by life—and by life with Williams—during her youth. Certainly he loved her dearly. She was for him confidante and critic and, for a time, his Beatrice, muse and model of perfection. The subsequent courtship, touch-and-go at first, intensified a few years after their first encounter, when Williams handed her, in the winter of 1913, a copy of his first book, a collection of eighty-two sonnets entitled The Silver Stair, telling her it was about renunciation and asking her opinion. She assumed this meant that the romance would lead nowhere, that he was about to join a monastery, until she arrived home, read the poems by candlelight, and said to herself, “Why, I believe they are about me!”
Well, not quite. Some of the verses do refer to Florence. Williams, a voracious reader, had just discovered Dante, who would be a lifelong inspiration, and Sonnet X, in which he describes glimpses of Florence on the streets of St. Albans, echoes blatantly the Master’s glimpses of hi
s beloved Beatrice on the streets of Florence:
How else so long have I gone up and down
Dull and in ignorance? in so small town,
So long have lighted not upon her ways?
But now each street is a path venturous,
Each cross of roads a passage perilous
With loveliness which is this city’s praise.
But Florence is but one instance of a universal principle, the Feminine Ideal, and most of the sonnets celebrate, with a young man’s ardor and sentiment, the miracle of women:
Fair women are the crown of loveliness
Which hath of Life been throned and set on high;
Unto a sweet and radiant sanctity
Their coming is a marvellous access.
They are the lifted hand of Time to bless,—
His delicate word; soft vanities and shy
Look from their eyes; their voices, passing by,
The very creed of Beauty do profess.
Here and there, among these passionate, purple lines, can be found intimations of an idea that would become the key to Williams’s work and life: that the ascent to God can be achieved in and through created things and especially in and through heterosexual romantic love. He came to call this ascent the “Way of Affirmation” or the “Way of Affirmation of Images,” and he saw it as an alternative to the mystic’s way of asceticism and apophaticism (describing and coming to know God by what he is not). The titles of these early sonnets state the case: “That the Love of a Woman Is the Vice-Gerent of God”; “That for Every Man a Woman Holds the Secret of Salvation.” In Sonnet LXVII, he for the first time advances, gingerly and obscurely, his argument:
All lives of lovers are His song of love,
Now low and soft and holy as a kiss,
Now high and clear and holy as a star.
Slave in Man’s house, yet builder-up thereof,
The silver and the golden stairs are His,
The altar His—yea, His the lupanar.
God, who is love (1 John 4:16), sings through the life of every lover; to Him belong the silver and golden stairs, obscure symbols representing, perhaps, the two ways—denying and affirming—that lead to God. So far, so uncontroversial; there is plenty of precedent for this, for example, in the Song of Songs. But the final line is a provocation. Williams means to shock, declaring that the things of God include not only the altar but also the lupanar, the celebrated ten-chambered brothel of Pompeii. This improbable juxtaposition of the spiritual and fleshly would lead Williams down many a curious path in the years to come, through the highlands of Arthurian romance and Dantean vision to the swamps of ritual magic and sadomasochism, as he made his way to God.
For now, however, he was that most glorious of beings, a poet. Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh, professor of poetry at Oxford, declared The Silver Stair to be “real poetry.” Chesterton showed more restraint and, it may be, better judgment; when Williams sent a copy to him, he failed to respond. No matter; neither neglect nor rejection could stop Williams’s pen. His brain was teeming with new poems; he published two more volumes, Poems of Conformity and Divorce, in the next eight years, not a bad rate of production, considering the catastrophic interruption of World War I. His poor eyesight and hand tremors excluded him from active service, but while Tolkien and Lewis trudged through the French mud, Williams did much the same on British soil, joining the St. Albans Volunteers and cutting trenches and building earthworks in London’s Hyde Park against the invasion that never came. In 1917, after nine years of dithering—war and financial worries had slowed the pace of romance—he and Florence married, taking a flat in north-central London. Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love, and to all accounts, he did so successfully, at least for a time.
But while his entry into the mysteries of marriage unfolded, a second, more arcane initiation was under way. In 1915, after reading Arthur Edward Waite’s The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal, Charles sent an copy of The Silver Stair to the author. Waite responded “very kindly, asking me to go and see him, and saying pleasant things generally.” This agreeable exchange soon gave rise to a friendship that would transform Williams’s life.
The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross
Arthur Waite (1857–1942), born in Brooklyn, New York, but raised in England, was by 1915 a world-famous Christian occultist, the author of numerous studies on kabbalah, alchemy, and Freemasonry and codesigner of the enormously popular Rider-Waite Tarot deck. A gentle, learned, handsome man, with a drooping moustache and a lively pen, Waite despised the sloppy scholarship and extravagant claims of many other occultists of the day, including Madame Blavatsky and S. L. MacGregor Mathers, and attempted to steer a purer, nobler, more respectable course into the Christian mysteries. In 1881 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an English magical order under the direction of the Freemason William Wynn Westcott. The Order’s pseudotraditional vestments and secret rites, stitched together from Catholic, Egyptian, and Rosicrucian threads, attracted a number of writers and intellectuals hungry for spiritual experience but disinclined toward orthodoxy, including William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Aleister Crowley. Waite remained active in the order for many years. Eventually, however, he had enough of its intemperate magical claims, if not its ceremonial posturing, and he quit in 1914. Almost immediately he established an alternative group, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, named after the principal symbol of Rosicrucianism, a cross with a white rose, symbolizing the way of Jesus Christ with occult wisdom at its center. Waite dedicated the group to the study and practice of esoteric Christian mysticism—or, in the pompous language of its “Constitution & Bylaws,” “a path of symbolism communicated in Ritual after the manner of the chief Instituted Mysteries.”
Williams was vastly impressed by Waite and his teachings. He joined the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross (and not, as many books about him assert, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) on the autumn equinox of 1917. He remained a member until 1928, enthusiastically participating in this Christian counterpart to Westcott’s more generic magical ceremonies. Like almost all esoteric organizations, the Fellowship was small in number (membership peaked at a little more than two hundred), ingrown, obsessed with secrecy (“all copies of Rituals … shall be kept in a locked case or box”), and aglow with the sense of its own importance, often indicated by a fondness for capitalized nouns; thus the Fellowship offered “the quest and attainment of the human soul on its return to the Divine Centre” and “true light of understanding on the Path of Union.”
None of this bothered Williams. He purchased, from clothiers Spencer & Co., the Fellowship’s standard robe for beginners, black with white silk collar, and he memorized the words and movements of the complex rites. Adopting the esoteric name of Frater Qui Sitit Veniat (The Brother Who Thirsts, Let Him Come), he rose in quick succession through the sacramental grades from “Adeptus Minor” to “Adeptus Exemptus” to the “Portal of the Fourth Order,” and finally to the “Ceremony of Consecration on the Threshold of Sacred Mystery.” During this last rite, which entailed a high priest “seated on his throne in the East between the pillars of the Temple” and a priestess “whose wand is crowned with Lilies,” acolytes were exhorted to “be ye transmuted therefore from dead stones into Living Philosophical stones, shining on everlasting hills, radiant on the mount of GOD.” During his esoteric ascent, Williams claimed several important positions in the Fellowship, including two six-month terms in its highest post, as Honourable Frater Philosophicus, or Master of the Temple, during which time he donned a red silk collar and a green robe, hung around his neck a large pendant bearing the Hebrew letter yod, and wielded a wand with a cross at its head.
Williams’s magical career is consistently underplayed by fans, followers, and a surprising number of Inklings scholars. To some extent this can be ascribed to lack of information, as details of twentieth-century British occult movements are not always easy to obtain. It is also, in many cases, wishfu
l thinking—i.e., “Williams may have been a bit odd, but certainly not that odd”—and may be, in a few instances, deliberate avoidance. Alice Hadfield, his first biographer, who was also a close friend, insisted that Williams was “not … much affected” by Waite’s ideas; yet there is ample evidence, in the themes and plot devices of his novels and poems (Tarot cards, hermetic rituals, magi, magical jewels), in his letters, in the ceremonial sword that he kept in his desk, and in his personal behavior, that Williams’s occult experience affected him long after he quit the group. Eventually, he established his own version of a magical organization, his Companions of the Co-inherence, in terms that bring to mind both the Golden Dawn and the Rosy Cross. Tolkien would declare himself “wholly unsympathetic to Williams’ mind,” in part because he intensely disliked Williams’s fiction but also, one senses, because as a Catholic he distrusted Williams’s fascination with the occult. Lois Lang-Sims, for a time one of his most committed disciples, believed that Williams’s obsession with magic never left him and led to his early death.
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 28