The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  ‘The poor benefit of a bewildering minute’ had a vivid place in the awareness of my lord’s poetic genius. It is in the mere admiration of what, in the contrasting line of Mr T. S. Eliot, has been, with a larger but inclusive scope, called ‘the infirm glory of the positive hour’. It was precisely the ‘infirm glory’ and ‘the poor benefit’ of which my lord’s angry contempt was contendingly aware.

  Graham Greene called this ‘pretentious jargon’, and said that one would hardly think it referred to a bawdy incident at the Customs. ‘A great deal of the book is very badly written,’ he added. ‘Mr Williams loses himself hopelessly in abstractions.’

  Even when Williams’s work was good, the fact that his large output covered several different fields of literature meant that he did not make his name as a specialist. Until 1939 only his novels built up any substantial regular following, and even then their sales were small. Gollancz, who published the first five, were not encouraged, and when Williams offered them another novel in 1937 they rejected it.

  This rejection was partly because the new book, Descent into Hell, was notably different from its predecessors, lacking their crisply dramatic opening chapters and having very little of the ‘thriller’ about it. It would probably not have been published at all had not T. S. Eliot accepted it on behalf of Faber & Faber, of which he was a director. Eliot said that he did not find it as enthralling as Williams’s earlier novels; but he liked it enough to want to see it in print. In fact Descent into Hell was a remarkable piece of work, in many ways better than anything Williams had done before. It was slow to gather momentum but eventually achieved a terrifying sense of the damnation of one man. Yet when it was published its success in financial terms was no greater than that of its predecessors. By this time Williams had to resign himself to the fact that if he had not exactly failed as a writer, he had by no means achieved the success for which he had once perhaps hoped.

  When war broke out in September 1939 he was fifty-two and not in the best of health – he had undergone a serious operation for a gastric disorder, intussuception, some years earlier. He was also very tired. He was, too, saddened by what had happened to the Press in the ten years since the Masques had been performed. The old sense of purpose had gone. Humphrey Milford, now Sir Humphrey, seemed more remote, and had withdrawn himself from all but necessary conversation (he was in fact suffering from an undiagnosed illness). And now, at the outbreak of war, the entire staff of Amen House were to be evacuated to Oxford. ‘To think we said the Masque was God!’ Williams wrote sadly.

  It was? My dear! How very odd!

  But if it was you must allow

  God is as dead as doornails now.

  PART THREE

  1

  ‘They are good for my mind’

  ‘Outside Lewis I never want to see anyone of Oxford or in Oxford again,’ Charles Williams wrote to his wife on 4 October 1939.

  He had moved down from London with his Oxford University Press colleagues a month earlier. Temporary office premises had been found for them in Southfield House, an unremarkable mansion on the Cowley Road to the east of the city, and things were very makeshift there. Most of the staff had to share cramped rooms and, though Williams was lucky enough to have an office to himself, that ‘office’ was a bathroom. Certainly it was a large bathroom, and somebody had fitted a cover to the bath so that it made a useful shelf for manuscripts and books. Nor was the view from the window at all bad: there was a gravel drive and a tall hedge, and beyond that were college playing-fields. But it was not the kind of view that Williams cared for. ‘I was just saying to C. S. L.’, he told his wife, ‘that I have a nostalgia for walking round the block in London – the City and the Dome; the flat and you.’

  At first it had been planned that his wife and son, Michal and Michael, should come and live in Oxford with him. They journeyed down from London just before war broke out, but Michal Williams did not much care for what she found. Charles had been offered accommodation by the Spalding family, who lived in a big house in South Parks Road near the centre of the city; they had got to know him some months earlier when his nativity play Seed of Adam was produced at the University Church by Ruth Spalding, a daughter of the family who worked for the Religious Drama Society. Ruth and her sister Anne were delighted to have him as a paying guest, and as their parents were in America there was room in the house to accommodate his wife and son until they could find something more permanent. But when the Williams family arrived, Michal was met almost on the doorstep by ‘the Aunt’, a fearsome member of the Spalding household, who cried: ‘Can you cook? Can you wash? Can you darn?’ Michal, not caring for this, turned tail and went back to London, taking the boy.

  ‘I sympathise with her,’ remarked Charles in a letter to a friend. ‘I wish I had the chance of doing the same thing!’ He liked the Spaldings and could see that Ruth and Anne were doing their best to make him comfortable; they had given him their parents’ bedroom, which allowed him plenty of space for working in the evenings. But there was no fire in the grate, so when the autumn turned to winter it was simply too cold to be more than tolerable, and he had to work downstairs in the drawing-room. This was certainly more cheerful, but it was also rather noisy, for Gerard Hopkins from the Press was also living in the house, and he would clatter away in the evenings on an ancient and loud typewriter. Williams managed to work against this background with his usual sixpenny writing-pad balanced on his knee, but he would certainly rather have been at home in the Hampstead flat.

  He wrote to his wife every couple of days or so. Undoubtedly in many ways he was not sorry that sixty miles now separated him from Michal for at least five days a week (he usually went home to London at week-ends), for the marriage had not become any easier as the years passed. Michal had eventually learnt about ‘Celia’ and Charles’s feelings for her; she also disliked the way that he had acquired a following of young women, and this too was a cause of some tension between them. But little of this was apparent in the letters that he now wrote her, letters that were full of affection and of nostalgia for the domesticity of their flat. Nor was this simply a pose adopted to placate Michal, for he really did miss that domesticity, and in particular the small snacks of tea and cake and sandwiches on which she had so often fed him while he was working late in the evening. ‘I am in one of my periodical fits of loathing the food at South Parks Road, which is unfair enough!’ he told her after a few months at the Spalding house, where the food was in the charge of rather old-fashioned servants who insisted on regular meal times. ‘But does anyone ever say, at 9.30, “Wouldn’t you like something to eat?” No. I even miss working to the sound of someone doing things about the place, and even being interrupted by a voice saying: “Darling, what about a cup of tea?” These things have been nine-tenths of my life.’

  Cups of tea mattered particularly to him. Like Roger Ingram in Shadows of Ecstasy, ‘if he had to choose for the rest of his life between wine and tea he had no kind of doubt where the choice would rest’. And as neither Southfield House where he was working nor South Parks Road where he was living afforded more than strictly limited supplies of tea, he was glad to discover somewhere that did. ‘I have fled to C. S. Lewis’s rooms,’ he told his wife soon after arriving in Oxford. ‘He is a great tea-drinker at any hour of the night or day, and left a tray for me with milk and tea, and an electric kettle at hand.’

  It was of course not just tea that he needed. ‘There is no-one here to whom I can talk about Taliessin,’ he told Michal, though he added, ‘there aren’t many in London.’ Certainly there were not. He badly needed criticism of a constructive kind, for he was writing more poetry for his Taliessin cycle, and even in London he knew few people whose knowledge of his work was sufficient and whose minds were sharp enough to be of much use. In Oxford he did not yet know of anybody who he thought could help. Lewis of course had admired the first volume of the cycle, Taliessin through Logres, but Williams still did not know Lewis very well.

  Yet Willi
ams gradually began to settle in. ‘Things are not too bad down here,’ he told a friend in mid-October 1939. ‘I dislike the conditions – but only mildly.’

  *

  No sooner had Williams arrived in Oxford than Lewis persuaded him to join the group that met in his Magdalen rooms to read their ‘work in progress’ aloud to each other, the group that Tolkien called ‘our literary club of practising poets’, the Inklings. They generally met on Thursday evenings during the University term and sometimes in vacation, and by November 1939 Williams was a regular member. One of the first things that he read to the Inklings was his new nativity play, The House by the Stable, which he had just finished writing for Ruth Spalding’s company to perform at the University Church. It was unconventional by the standard of most nativity plays (its characters included Pride and Hell), but it was a lucid piece of work, and Lewis, after listening to Williams reading it aloud to the Inklings, remarked that it was ‘unusually intelligible’ for Williams. On the other hand Lewis did not hesitate to criticise Williams’s work severely when he thought fit. ‘We had an unusually good Inklings on Thursday,’ he recorded in May 1940, ‘at which Charles Williams read us a Whitsun play, a mixture of very good stuff and some deplorable errors in taste.’ The play was called Terror of Light, and its chief ‘error in taste’ was the invention of a romance between Mary Magdalen and St John.

  Williams soon began to realise that Lewis’s considerable admiration for his work was tempered with criticism which could often be severe. Lewis said of Williams: ‘He is largely a self-educated man, labouring under an almost oriental richness of imagination (“Clotted glory from Charles” as Dyson called it) which could be saved from turning silly or even vulgar in print only by a severe early discipline which he never had.’ Lewis was surely thinking of his own ‘severe early discipline’ under Kirkpatrick. He also wrote of Williams: ‘He has an undisciplined mind and sometimes admits into his theology ideas whose proper place is in his romances.’ Lewis attacked, too, what he considered to be one of Williams’s chief failings, his obscurity. ‘Don’t imagine I didn’t pitch into Charles Williams for his obscurity for all I was worth,’ he told Owen Barfield a few years later. In fact Williams found in Lewis what he had almost entirely lacked up to this time – a friend of high intellectual ability who was fundamentally very enthusiastic about Williams’s work, but was also extremely and beneficially critical.

  In the weekly gatherings of the Inklings, Williams found something else of great value. Besides the reading aloud and the criticism, the Thursday evening sessions in Magdalen gave plenty of chances for good talk, and for the first time in many years Williams found himself arguing and discussing in the company of men who were his equals as debaters. It was true that in his early days there had been male friends at the Working Men’s College with whom he had argued and walked about London for hours as they talked, ‘men splendid among men’ as he had called them. And some years later he had formed a strong friendship of this kind with Daniel Nicholson, a man of energetically sceptical mind who edited the Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse for the Press; Williams had found in him somebody who was fully his equal in conversation. But Nicholson died in 1935, and since then, though many of his friends had minds of equal calibre, there had been almost nobody who took the same delight in argument. The Inklings now began to fill that gap.

  Indeed, in some respects Williams now found himself not just among intellectual equals but arguing with people whose knowledge was often greater than his own. He was himself, after all, not particularly learned. Lewis called him ‘a cheering proof of how far a man can go with few languages and imperfect schooling’. His knowledge of classical authors and of the early Middle Ages was certainly not equal to Lewis’s; on the other hand, as Lewis was quick to point out, his expertise in history, theology, comparative religions, and most of all English literature from Shakespeare onwards, was considerable. He could also quote with amazing fluency. ‘Before he came,’ said Lewis, ‘I had passed for our best conduit of quotations: but he easily outstripped me. He delighted to repeat favourite passages, and nearly always both his voice and the context got something new out of them. He excelled at showing you the little grain of truth or felicity in some passage generally quoted for ridicule, while at the same time he fully enjoyed the absurdity: or, contrariwise, at detecting the little falsity or dash of silliness in a passage which you, and he also, admired.’

  In The Place of the Lion, Williams wrote a passage which showed how much he valued the stimulus of such friendships as he found in the Inklings: ‘Much was possible to a man in solitude, but some things were possible only to a man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly.’

  At one Inklings evening soon after Williams’s arrival in Oxford, he, Lewis and Tolkien started to argue about the meaning of Christ’s words Narrow is the way and few be they that find it, which Lewis called ‘one of the most distressing texts in the Bible’ because it suggested a universe where the majority of souls were damned. Also present was Tolkien’s fellow Anglo-Saxonist Charles Wrenn, who sometimes came along to these Thursday meetings, and he took exception to what he considered to be Williams’s thoroughly heretical views on the subject. Williams believed that ‘the way’ included not merely the holy life of an ascetic but also Affirmation, the knowledge of God through such things as Romantic Theology. This sort of thing seemed entirely inadmissible to Wrenn, who (Lewis reported) ‘almost seriously expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to bum people’. Williams in fact found himself having to defend his opinions more strenuously than he had done for years. Writing to his wife, he declared of the Inklings: ‘They are good for my mind.’

  On the other hand the Inklings were not, ultimately, terribly important to him. The Thursday nights at Magdalen and the friendship with Lewis were stimulating, and very welcome, but such things did not really have much to do with the fundamentals of his mind. All his ideas had been developed long before he had come to Oxford, and the thing that occupied his imagination chiefly at the present time – the composition of more poems for Taliessin – was a private task to which the Inklings could not contribute. It was true that he did read some of his Taliessin verse aloud on Thursday nights, but everybody except Lewis found it incomprehensible. And even Lewis, whose manner tended to be heavyweight in such things, was not able to offer the particular level of sympathetic understanding that Williams needed. ‘I brood on and off on the new poems but nothing much gets done,’ he told his London friend Anne Ridler. ‘No-one of a vivid brain ever talks to me about them – or at least no-one in the way I like. C. S. L. admires them and alludes to them, but …’

  *

  If Lewis was not ultimately very useful to Williams as a critic, he was able to do one valuable thing for him. He arranged for Williams to give a course of lectures in the University; and this was a form of official recognition which very much gratified Williams.

  The idea occurred to Lewis during the Michaelmas term of 1939, when he had a chance to observe at first hand Williams’s unique manner as a lecturer. In November he went to one of the women’s colleges to hear Williams read a paper; ‘or rather not “read”’, Lewis reported, ‘but “spout” – i.e. deliver without a single note a perfectly coherent and impassioned meditation, variegated with quotations in his incantatory manner. A most wonderful performance and it impressed his audience, specially the young women, very much. And it really is remarkable how that ugly, almost simian, face, becomes transfigured.’

  It was one thing for Williams to give an informal address to a group of undergraduates, but quite another for him to lecture formally for the English Faculty. In fact under normal conditions it might have proved impossible to arrange it, because Williams was not only unconnected with the University in
any official capacity but was not a graduate, having broken off his formal education without taking a degree. Nevertheless Lewis was determined, as he put it, ‘to smuggle him into the Oxford lecture list, so that we might have some advantage from the great man’s accidental presence in Oxford’. And since in wartime there was a shortage of teaching staff Lewis managed to arrange it. Yet Oxford snobbery still had its say. ‘The vulgarest of my pupils,’ snorted Lewis, ‘asked me, with an air, if Williams had a degree. The whelp!’

  The course of lectures was to be on Milton, and the choice of subject was significant, for Lewis realised that Williams had much to say that was relevant to contemporary criticism of Milton’s poetry. Attacks on Milton’s style and on the supposedly unsympathetic character of Pạradise Lost had been going on for more than two centuries. In recent times the attackers had included Middleton Murry, who said of Milton, ‘We cannot make him real; he does not, either in his great effects or his little ones, trouble our depths’, and T. S. Eliot, who declared that Milton’s style had done damage to the English language, and said that he found the theology of Paradise Lost ‘repellent’. Williams took a very different line, and Lewis (knowing this) was keen that what he had to say about Milton should be said in front of an Oxford audience.

  On 28 January 1940 Williams told his wife: ‘To-morrow I go to Magdalen at 10.45, where Lewis and Tolkien will put on their gowns and take me to the Divinity School. Of course there may be no-one there! but I suppose, in the grand Oxford Tradition, one lectures anyhow.’

  There was in fact quite a sizeable audience, for Williams’s name was known to at least some undergraduates. The first lecture, which was chiefly introductory, was successful if not startling. Afterwards Lewis took Williams and Tolkien, along with Gerry Hopkins from the Press who had come to listen, to the bar of the Mitre Hotel to celebrate the occasion. A week later the same people reassembled to hear the second lecture in the series, which was to be on Milton’s masque Comus. Lewis described the occasion to his brother Warnie, who was now serving as a Major at a supply depot in one of the French ports: