The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Meanwhile, Weston and Divine, driven by lust for knowledge and power, have committed the first Malacandrian murder, slaying Ransom’s closest friend among the hrossa. Dragged before the Oyarsa, Weston delivers a jingoistic speech in a scene that makes high comedy out of his pose as a noble martyr for science and civilization. The Oyarsa, with perfect justice, sends the three humans back to Earth. Weston and Devine plan to kill Ransom en route, but he narrowly escapes, and returns to tell the tale to his friend, the fictional C. S. Lewis, and to await further angelic instructions. The earth is under siege, but not abandoned, for it has been ransomed by the divine Son, Maleldil; and Ransom’s own journey into deep heaven, though seemingly a chance event, is a sign that the siege may be lifting.

  Out of the Silent Planet is not difficult to decode, but no less delightful for being transparent. It is largely about seeing: seeing humanity in the nonhuman rational creature; seeing angelic forms just beyond the range of normal perception; and seeing the cosmos just beyond the range of materialistic science, as a place of meaning and purpose. Space is deep heaven (the Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote to thank Lewis for this idea) and the planets are “mere holes or gaps in the living heaven … formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.” It is a revitalized picture of the universe that owes something to Chesterton’s “cosy little cosmos,” but the details come from what Lewis liked to call the “medieval model,” as he put it in the lectures that would become The Discarded Image:

  … to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The “space” of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony … This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien—all agoraphobia—is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky.

  The “medieval model” was not simply bad science; in many ways it was, Lewis believed, scientifically astute: “Earth was, by cosmic standards, a point—it had no appreciable magnitude. The stars, as the Somnium Scipionis had taught, were larger than it. Isidore in the sixth century knows that the Sun is larger, and the Moon smaller than the Earth (Etymologies, III, xlvii–xlviii). Maimonides in the twelfth maintains that every star is ninety times as big, Roger Bacon in the thirteenth simply that the least star is ‘bigger’ than she.” There is neither fundamentalism nor flat-earth pseudoscience in the medieval model, nor in Lewis’s fictional appropriation of it.

  By a happy accident, Lewis found in one of the texts discussed in his lectures, the Cosmographia of the twelfth-century Christian Platonist Bernard Silvestris, a conjecture about an “Oyarses” who shapes things in the lower world after the pattern of the higher world. The Magdalen fellow C.C.J. Webb suggested to Lewis that Oyarses might be a corruption of Ousiarches, “ruling essence”—which appears in the Asclepius of Pseudo-Apuleius. Perhaps Oyarses could be the tutelary genius assigned to a planet, after the manner of the angels assigned to the nations. There was room for the pagan gods in Lewis’s Christian cosmos, provided they appeared as angels or “middle spirits,” archetypes or allegorical figures. Thus, in his alliterative poem, “The Planets” (1935), the planetary gods return as “Lady Luna in light canoe,” Mercury “madcap rover,” Venus’s floral and copper glories, Sol’s burning chariot, “Mars mercenary,” Jove “calm and kingly,” Saturn silent and melancholy.

  It was Lewis’s inspiration, in the Ransom trilogy, to transpose the medieval model to a modern “scientifictional” frame. Though he was criticized by some readers for being weak on the technological side, his real object, at which he succeeded, was to reimagine the universe as an organic whole, teeming with life and intelligence, hierarchically differentiated, and knit together by an inner telos; as a cosmic order whose microcosm is the rational creature made in the image and likeness of God, marred (in our world) by the Fall, but restored by the deifying light. No achievement of genuine science, Lewis was convinced, can render the essential features of this medieval model obsolete; it is only a crude scientism that makes it seem so. And since crude scientism is a failure of perspective and imagination, imaginative literature would prove to be the best remedy.

  Lewis read Out of the Silent Planet in draft form to the Inklings. Tolkien approved, but thought it too short and deficient in matters of consistency and philological detail. Lewis quickly revised to accommodate these criticisms and sent the manuscript to Stanley Unwin for consideration. The first report from an external reader was lukewarm: “Mr. Lewis is quite likely, I dare say, to write a worth while novel one day. This one isn’t good enough—quite.” Unwin sent the report to Tolkien, who, in a letter of March 4, 1938, rose to Lewis’s defense. If Lewis’s otherworldly creatures were really “bunk,” as the external reader had opined, then so was the myth of the Fall of angels and men; and if that myth were bunk, very little of Western literature would be left standing. Thanks to Tolkien’s intervention, the book was accepted for publication.

  Companions of the Co-inherence

  “It was the full Celian sun that uttered to all of me the identical words of Christ: ‘I am come that ye may have life, and that ye may have it more abundantly.’” Williams was writing constantly to Phyllis Jones, his Celia, still seven thousand miles away in Java, inundating her with praise and advice. She disliked the island, disdained the racial and cultural snobbery of her husband’s oil company coworkers, felt trapped in her marriage, dreamed wistfully of Williams, and asked him, “Am I still Celia?” She would always be Celia, always Beatrice: “Quite clearly, quite certainly,” he replied, “You are all that I ever said. I always saw you … Dear Celia, you are an exactitude of vision.” The last sentence is obscure but calls to mind Dante’s visions of Beatrice in La Vita Nuova. Future letters upped the ante, touching on intimacies physical and spiritual, achieved or simply aspired after. He called Celia “darling,” he gloried in “the anatomical articulation of your joints and also the articulation of speech,” and declared her “frame” to be the “compressed epigram” of both articulations. Bewildered, unhappy, she sent an equivocal response, and he lashed out, like an overwrought adolescent (he was nearly fifty years old at the time): “I will not discuss it now. I am too angry at heart … I love you … Goodbye. O I hate, hate, everything—the world and myself and you—I hate it for months, and it grows. Blessing, be blessed.” No wonder Williams’s wife resented his never-ending platonic passions. She was plagued by terrible backaches, then fell sick with pneumonia. Despite the presence of little Michael, the Williamses’ was not a happy home.

  Work provided refuge. Williams plunged into new acquisitions, roping Auden into the fold to produce The Oxford Book of Light Verse and—a magnificent coup, his very finest as an editor—steering into print, in December 1936, David F. Swenson’s translation of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, the first of the Danish philosopher’s works to appear in England, followed soon after by Walter Lowrie’s massive biography Kierkegaard and Alexander Dru’s edition of the great Dane’s journals. Many more Kierkegaard volumes would follow, all brought to press by Williams. It was a perfect match of editor and subject, for the two shared not only a liking for multiple personae but the conviction that their work might help to restore the Church to its original promise (Kierkegaard by his attacks upon the Danish Lutheran establishment, Williams by his proselytizing for the Way of Affirmation). “He was,” wrote Williams of Kierkegaard but as if describing himself, “the type of the new state of things in which Christendom had to exist.” To bring this strange obscure life and work to the attention of the world was an unmitigated joy: “Kierkegaard at any rate,” he wrote to Lowrie, “whatever his other influence, has brought one group of hi
s admirers into what is almost a state of love.”

  He loved Kierkegaard, in addition to the reasons given above, because Kierkegaard wrote at a furious clip. Williams did his best to emulate this practice. Alice Hadfield remembers the intensity of his literary concentration, even when on the premises of Amen House: “He wrote a great deal of poetry early in the day, composing all the way from Hampstead in the privacy and freedom of being alone in crowds. He used to march into Amen House, generally looking very grave because he was thinking verse, go straight upstairs, only raising his gloves in greeting to anyone who passed him, slap the gloves and hat on a peg, drop himself into his chair, scramble for a cigarette and start to write on his little pad.”

  In 1936, the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral asked him to write a play for their annual Canterbury Festival. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral had been the 1935 production; Williams must have realized, when he received the invitation, that he had finally arrived. The production of Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury garnered raves; Eliot attended and invited Williams to “lunch … tea … dinner … supper—or breakfast at any time.” The following year, he published another novel, Descent into Hell, a supernatural drama of sin and salvation that received a tepid critical and popular reception (although Lewis, at this point enamored of every word Williams wrote, called it “a thundering good book”). His most ambitious book of poetry, Taliessin Through Logres, a sequence of dense, elliptical poems on the Arthurian legend, appeared in 1938. Lewis again bubbled with enthusiasm, telling Williams it was “a great work, full of glory” and writing a nine-page review for Theology. Other Inklings disagreed. When Williams read the poem to the group, Havard recalled that “I’ve never listened to anything quite so obscure” and that others were “literally struck dumb like myself.” The public, too, withheld their applause. The truth is that Taliessin and all of Williams’s later Arthurian work, a tangled array of fraught syntax, elevated feelings, and shifting moods, is rarely picked up, more rarely read, and even more rarely enjoyed. When Williams’s novels suffer from obscurity, thanks to esoteric illusions and occasionally tortured prose, the plot usually affords enough excitement to carry the reader along. In his poetry, there is no such mediating grace; the poems may reward close reading, but few readers make the effort. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; although Williams counted himself a poet (his epitaph reads simply “Poet”), most people read him for his thrilling supernatural clashes of good versus evil and his adventurous theology.

  Turning once again to his true strength, in 1938 Williams also published He Came Down from Heaven, a potpourri of lively writings on heaven, Adam and Eve, the prophets, the Incarnation, the theology of romantic love, and the city, the latter being Williams’s ideal community of love. He dedicated the book, perhaps for expiatory reasons, “To MICHAL, by whom I began to study the doctrine of glory.” The next year saw the appearance of what may be his most widely read theological work, The Descent of the Dove, a history of the Church in the form of a biography of the Holy Spirit, written in a distinctly Anglican idiom. He had hit his stride and was moving from strength to strength.

  These varied volumes from the mid and late 1930s, produced at white-hot speed, cover a plenitude of topics. And yet in a sense they can all be read as one continuous book. This is because a trinity of ideas runs through them all; ideas that Williams had nurtured for many years, foreshadowing them in his fiction but never before enunciating them at length. These are his three great doctrines of substitution, exchange, and co-inherence.

  At its most exalted, substitution refers to Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross, when he offered himself as a sacrificial lamb to atone for our sins. Williams believed that each of us may, in a lesser mode, repeat this divine sacrifice by bearing one another’s burdens. Exchange, closely allied to substitution—sometimes Williams used the two terms interchangeably—is a spiritual way, a daily practice in which we offer our time, money, and self-esteem for another’s sake. As Williams is quick to point out, this practice demands a high degree of humility and love. What makes substitution and exchange possible is co-inherence. God provides us with a divine model of co-inherence: in the Trinity, three Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) co-inhere in one Godhead. So, too, are we part of one another, co-inhering in our shared human nature and in the Mystical Body of Christ. Romantic love, always of intense interest to Williams, is an imperfect expression of co-inherence, flawed because contaminated by fantasy and self-love.

  Co-inherence was the ruling principle of Williams’s life and the idea for which he is best remembered. He sought by every means to nourish this principle in his own life and that of his fellows; thus his habit of assigning theatrical titles to employees at Amen House, creating from the clashing temperaments and shifting alliances of a typical large office a company of companions, a co-inherent circle based upon mythical identities and the seminuminous aura engendered. In The Descent of the Dove, he speculates about the possibility of a new force within the Church, the Order of the Co-inherence (later, the Companions of the Co-inherence), created to foster “substitutions in love, exchanges in love.” Within a year, prompted by requests from friends and devotees, he drew up a skeletal rule for the order. These are the first four decrees (the remainder describe co-inherence, substitution, and exchange):

  1. The Order has no constitution except in its members. As it was said: Others he saved, himself he cannot save.

  2. It recommends nevertheless that its members shall make a formal act of union with it and of recognition of their own nature. As it was said: Am I my brother’s keeper?

  3. Its concern is the practice of the apprehension of the Co-inherence both as a natural and a supernatural principle. As it was said: Let us make man in Our image.

  4. It is therefore, per necessitatem, Christian. As it was said: And whoever says there was when this was not, let him be anathema.

  Readers may note echoes, in the imperious tone, the oracular rhythms, the recommendation of a “formal act of union,” the reference to principles natural and supernatural, the presiding Hermetic idea of “as above, so below,” of Waite’s Order of the Rosy Cross. Williams had learned his lessons well, and until his death his own order co-inhered, its members striving to put into practice their teacher’s lessons, turning to him whenever needed for encouragement and direction. The order did some good; according to Hadfield, herself a member, Williams frequently “used the Companions in their proper service of exchange, asking each one to help another when he or she heard of trouble.” But the group never attained the status that Williams had envisioned in Descent, that of an authorized, sanctified order within the church. It remained a private affair, an exchange of vows and charity among friends, under the eye of a charismatic founder, and perhaps inevitably, it dissolved upon Williams’s death. Indeed, if he had lived a few more years, his order might have fallen apart, like so many other private spiritual organizations, by internal backbiting and scandal. For Williams himself, as we will see, had secrets that made him, if not ineligible, at least highly problematic as a spiritual director for his order, or for anyone at all.

  The Coming of the Dark

  Co-inherence was soon to be sorely tested by events on a larger stage than Oxford. The Inklings had long suspected that war was on the way. Throughout the 1930s, Barfield fumed over England’s policy of appeasement toward Hitler. His anger intensified when the Nazi government banned the Anthroposophical Society in 1935. Even the London newspapers, he believed, intended to suppress news of Hitler’s misdeeds, and he canceled his subscription to The Times in protest. Lewis, by contrast, knew little of political machinations but dreaded the possibility of worldwide bloodshed. Dark forebodings filled his letters as the decade rushed to a close. On September 12, 1938, he wrote to Barfield what reads like a farewell letter, speculating that “our whole joint world may be blown up before the end of the week” and adding, “If we are separated, God bless you, and thanks for a hundred good things I owe to you, more than I can count or weigh. In some
ways we’ve had a corking time these twenty years.” He harbored no doubts about the moral legitimacy of taking on the Germans, for, as he told Bede Griffiths, he had “always believed that it is lawful for a Christian to bear arms in war.” “Our Lord does not appear to have regarded the Roman soldiers as ex officio sinners,” he continued; “I cannot believe the knight errant idea to be sinful.” Pacifism offered a poor substitute; writing to Theology, he observed that “Christendom has made two efforts to deal with the evil of war—chivalry and pacifism. Neither succeeded. But I doubt whether chivalry has such an unbroken record of failure as pacifism.” He was ready to cheer on the troops.

  Tolkien was primed as well. He, like Barfield, held a personal grudge against the Nazis, for besmirching whatever pride he felt in his German ancestry and for persecuting Jews, many of whom he counted as friends. His feelings boiled over in a magnificent letter addressed on July 25, 1938, to the Potsdam firm of Rütten & Loening, which planned a German edition of The Hobbit and had inquired about Tolkien’s arisch (Aryan) background. “I regret,” Tolkien icily responded, “that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch … But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” For good measure, he added, with prescience, that if such inquiries continued, “the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.” Five months later, the Foreign Office approached him about working as a cryptographer if war should break out, and from March 27 to 30, 1939, he took the office’s four-day cryptography course. In October, however, for reasons that remain obscure but that may be connected to Edith’s precarious health, the office told him that his services would not be required.