The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Though this should not be taken too closely as autobiography – Williams’s marriage was, after all, a source of stress as much as of happiness – he undoubtedly regarded romantic love as ultimately of far greater importance than ‘things native and natural to the male’. This of course set him strongly apart from Lewis and Tolkien. Nor where the practical question of authority in marriage was concerned did he exactly share Lewis’s view of the natural headship of the husband. When discussing Milton’s view of marriage in Paradise Lost (a view that closely resembles Lewis’s own) Williams declared: ‘Milton’s principles of the relations of the sexes may have been all wrong – probably because any principle of the relations of the sexes will be wrong, since there are, after all, no such things; there are an infinite number of women and an infinite number of men.’

  *

  Barfield, Dyson, Havard, and many of the others who were in the Inklings at one time or another were married men who did not depend so exclusively on male friendship as did Lewis. Yet for those of them who were close to Lewis friendship with him proved to be a uniquely rich experience. ‘He gave one a warmth of friendship,’ said Havard, ‘which I have never met anywhere else.’

  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.

  5

  ‘Hwaet! we Inclinga’

  ‘The war and Oxford make it impossible to settle,’ Charles Williams wrote to his wife in December 1939. ‘Poetry is different; poetry is still more me than I am; and the coming of great lines is less one’s work than – something. If I could do as I chose and yet had to be down here, I would do nothing but think of the next Taliessin group. However – “all luck is good”; I think it even if I have not felt it – not habitually.’

  ‘All luck is good’ was the theme of Williams’s play The Death of Good Fortune. It expressed his profound belief that every event, however apparently evil, will lead to some good. It was of course easier to say it than to apply it to his own life. Living a makeshift existence, moving daily between his temporary home in South Parks Road, his office at Southfield House and Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, he might still have been at ease had circumstances allowed him to devote his mind to the only form of writing he really cared about, the Taliessin poems. By the end of 1939 he had completed some verse for the next volume of the cycle; but there was still so much that he wanted to think about. Or rather, he wanted to be in a frame of thought where ‘the coming of great lines’ could be allowed to happen uninterrupted by more trivial concerns. However, that was not to be. He needed money, and he must do commissioned work. There were a good many commissions, too. T. S. Eliot, who was now his publisher, had contracted him to do a book for Faber’s on the history of witchcraft, and as 1939 came to an end he worked wearily at it. ‘It is a dull book,’ he told his wife in one of his almost daily letters to her, ‘and I have no interest in it whatever.’ However, when it was eventually finished Eliot thought it acceptable, and that meant a cheque from the publishers. And as soon as it was done, there was The Forgiveness of Sins to be tackled for Ashley Sampson at Geoffrey Bles, as well as several plays that had been commissioned by religious drama groups. All the time there was also a steady flow of reviews and articles to be written. ‘I am particularly taken with the idea’, he told his wife, ‘that the article on “The City in English Poetry” will (a little late!) pay the last insurance almost exactly. Very useful!’ And later, while writing a play for a missionary society: ‘The Teeth Bill has come and is £16/16/-. It shall be paid as soon as the Play’s done: this play will always mean Teeth to me.’

  Most of his letters to his wife contained a pound note, which he sent to help her with housekeeping at their London flat where she was still living despite the danger of bombs. But sometimes he could not even afford that small sum. ‘I had hoped that some cheque or other would have enabled me to send you another pound at once; however, there isn’t one. A letter asking me if I will write a pamphlet for some religious views: 4000 words for £2.2.0 – I ask you! Nevertheless I think I shall do it, and make £2.2.0 instead of nothing.’

  Quite why he had so little money it was difficult to say. The Press still paid him his salary, and the expense of living in Oxford was not very great. Moreover one of his female admirers, a woman called Margaret Douglas, had come to live in the Randolph Hotel with her mother, so as to be away from London and near C. W., and on Sunday nights the Douglases fed him at their table in the hotel. But, if that saved him a few shillings, he was always buying a drink or a meal for a friend, or he was giving away a pound or two to someone who had come to see him from a long distance and was in need of help. ‘We have never lost by being free-handed,’ he told his wife. ‘I feel that we have done better, in freedom and friendship, than the more cautious kind of people. We are Elizabethans, not Victorians.’

  Meanwhile he lived much of his life in cafés and pubs, eating a sandwich with a London friend who was passing through, drinking beer with one of the Inklings, or dealing with the emotional crisis of some complete stranger who had read his books and arrived without warning to ask his advice. And always there was more writing to plan. ‘I have a kind of yearning towards a novel,’ he told his wife in the summer of 1940, ‘but I don’t see my way yet.’

  *

  C. S. Lewis was an obvious choice as one of the contributors to Ashley Sampson’s series of wartime books for his firm Geoffrey Bles, which was called ‘Christian Challenge’. Lewis was known to be a comparatively recent convert to Christianity, and his Pilgrim’s Regress (though it had not sold many copies) was generally admired. Sampson asked Lewis to tackle the difficult subject of the Christian justification of pain and suffering. Lewis agreed, began the book in the summer of 1939, read it to the Inklings – to whom it was eventually dedicated – and obtained their approval, asked Havard to contribute an appendix on the clinical effects of pain, and finished the book by the spring of 1940. When The Problem of Pain was published the following autumn it was received enthusiastically by a large number of readers – larger, perhaps, than in peacetime, for the war had filled the churches. ‘One unexpected feature of life at present,’ Lewis noted shortly after the outbreak of war, ‘is that it is quite hard to get a seat in church.’ This apparent religious revival included the University, and as the war progressed it was noticeable that Christianity was being regarded much more sympathetically at Oxford than it had been in the thirties. The Oxford Union debated the motion ‘That a return to God through organised religion is essential for the establishment of a new world order’, and the majority in favour was seen to be so great that no division was taken. Meanwhile one day coming out of church at Headington Quarry on a summer Sunday morning, Lewis was ‘struck by an idea for a book which I think might be both useful and entertaining. It would be called “As one Devil to another” and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first “patient”. The idea would be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.’ The Screwtape Letters were finished in a few months, and were passed to a Christian newspaper, which serialised them during 1941. Ashley Sampson published them in book form the following spring, and so great was the demand for copies that Screwtape had to be reprinted eight times that year alone. An American edition came out in 1943 and was soon a best-seller. Lewis’s name had suddenly become known to thousands of readers.

  ‘In 1943 I came across Screwtape Letters,’ recalled an American admirer, one of many who wrote gratefully to Lewis. ‘I was a Junior in college then and trying to find myself intellectually and spiritually. I resolved on that Sunday evening to live a positive life for Christ rather than one just out of the reach of evil.’ And another American wrote ‘to thank you for having turned me into
a reasoning and fairly lovable Christian. It seems I was quite the simpering little demon before reading Screwtape.’

  Lewis himself could not say quite why the book appealed so widely, except that the temptations it described were drawn closely from his personal experience. ‘If one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week,’ he observed, ‘one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home.’ Certain elements of Screwtape are indeed at times distinctly recognisable as relating to Lewis’s own life, not least the figure of the mother, ‘the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table’. Life with Mrs Moore was no easier at this period than it had been before the war.

  Lewis dedicated Screwtape to Tolkien, adding beneath the printed dedication in Tolkien’s own copy, ‘In token payment of a great debt’. Tolkien himself was not altogether enthusiastic about the book, for as somebody who believed profoundly in the power of evil he thought it foolish to trifle rather facetiously with such things. Not that Lewis himself was much in doubt about the reality of evil. When discussing belief in the Devil or devils he said quite categorically, ‘I do believe such beings exist.’ Indeed, by temperament he inclined strongly towards dualism, the belief that God and the Devil are equal powers at war with each other. ‘I have always gone as near Dualism as Christianity allows,’ he admitted. Though as an orthodox Christian he had to reject the fully dualist view of the world, he did believe firmly that while the power of evil could create nothing, it could infect everything. In The Problem of Pain he even suggested (with dubious orthodoxy) that Satan might be the cause of certain pains and diseases.1

  If he was not a dualist, was he a fundamentalist? The Problem of Pain and the many books of Christian ‘apology’ with which Lewis followed it certainly suggest that he came close to a belief in the literal truth of the entire Bible. Lewis himself said of this:

  I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the grounds that it includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than did St Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation ‘after the manner of a popular poet’ (as we should say, mythically).

  But, although he did not believe the Bible to be the direct and flawless product of divine inspiration, he did declare himself to be ‘a dogmatic Christian untinged with Modernist reservations and committed to supernaturalism in its full rigour’. He was in fact not a theologian in any true sense of the word, for he did not set about an investigation of doctrine, but rather made himself an apologist, a defender of the faith in its full orthodoxy. He was largely ignorant of the work of modern theologians, and was proud of this ignorance, because he thought it helped him to avoid taking sides in any faction-fights. ‘A great deal of my utility’, he wrote in 1963, ‘has depended on my having kept out of all dog-fights between professing schools of “Christian thought”.’ He was, however, candid in his dislike of the ‘demythologisers’, particularly (in the nineteen-sixties) John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich and author of Honest to God, whom Lewis named ‘the Bishop of Woolworths’. To someone who had come to Christianity through a perception of its character as a myth, the notion of abandoning that myth was the ultimate absurdity.

  If Screwtape was written with complete sincerity, the actual task of writing it proved to be remarkably unpleasant. ‘Though I had never written anything more easily,’ Lewis recalled, ‘I never wrote with less enjoyment. Though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst and itch. It almost smothered me before I was done.’

  Although Charles Williams wrote extensively about black magic, and though his novels deal largely with the supernatural contention of good and evil, he did not share Lewis’s precise and explicit belief in the Devil. ‘The devil, even if he is a fact, has been an indulgence,’ Williams wrote when discussing the problem of evil in He Came Down From Heaven. ‘We have relieved our own sense of moral submission [to God] by contemplating, even disapprovingly, something which was neither moral nor submissive. While he [the devil] exists there is always something to which we can be superior.’ Williams believed the cause of evil to lie not so much in direct supernatural influence as in the capacity of human beings to envisage something other than pure good. He wrote that the Fall ‘was merely the wish to know an antagonism in the good, to find out what the good would be like if a contradiction were introduced into it’. However, he answered Screwtape in kind. Reviewing it in Time & Tide he wrote: ‘My dearest Scorpuscle: It is a dangerous book, heavenly-dangerous. I hate it, this give-away of hell.’ He signed the review ‘Your sincere friend, Snigsozzle’, and added as a postscript: ‘You will send someone to see after Lewis? – some very clever fiend?’

  *

  ‘Hwæt! we Inclinga,’ wrote Tolkien, parodying the opening lines of Beowulf, ‘on ærdagum searopancolra snyttru gehierdon.’ ‘Lo! we have heard in old days of the wisdom of the cunning-minded Inklings; how those wise ones sat together in their deliberations, skilfully reciting learning and song-craft, earnestly meditating. That was true joy!’ The poem continued for two more lines:

  þara wæs Hloðuig sum, hæleða dyrost,

  brad ond beorhtword, cuþe he …

  ‘One of them was Hlothwig, dearest of men, broad and bright of word; he knew …’. ‘Hlothwig’ was the Anglo-Saxon form of the Germanic name from which ‘Lewis’ was ultimately derived, and if Tolkien had not abandoned the poem at this point he might have gone on to portray all the Inklings in turn. Certainly that was what he attempted in a series of clerihews.

  Dr U. Q. Humphrey

  Made poultices of comfrey.

  If you didn’t pay his bills

  He gave you doses of squills.

  ‘Humphrey’ Havard was called up in 1943 and served in the navy as a medical officer. When he appeared in Oxford on leave he was seen to have grown a surprisingly rust-coloured beard. The Inklings immediately gave him yet another nickname, ‘the Red Admiral’. Later, Tolkien managed to put Havard in touch with a malaria research unit which was based in Oxford, and he was allowed to come home and work for the unit. ‘Almost the only wire I have ever pulled that has rung a bell,’ Tolkien remarked, and it was perhaps with this in mind (and recalling Tolkien’s skill many years earlier in the syllabus reforms) that Lewis once referred to Tolkien as ‘The Lord of the Strings’.

  Tolkien’s clerihews surveyed each of the Inklings in turn.

  Mr Owen Barfield’s

  Habit of turning cartwheels

  Made some say: ‘He’s been drinking!’

  It was only ‘conscientious thinking’.

  The cartwheels were of an intellectual sort, and ‘conscientious thinking’ was one of Barfield’s terms for the thought processes related to Anthroposophy. Barfield was only a rare visitor to the Inklings, but Tolkien recorded the proceedings one Thursday night when he was there: ‘I reached the Mitre at 8 where I was joined by C. W. and the Red Admiral, resolved to take fuel on board before joining the well-oiled diners in Magdalen (C. S. L. and Owen Barfield). C. S. L. was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while O. B. is the only man who can tackle C. S. L. making him define everything, and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which had an outsider dropped he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form. On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on and define “Chance”, Jack said: “Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great
deal less about Chance than you might have.” Warnie: “That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.” But there was some quite interesting stuff. A short play on Jason and Medea by Barfield, two excellent sonnets sent by a young poet to C. S. L.; and some illuminating discussion of “ghosts”, and of the special nature of Hymns (C. S. L. has been on the Committee revising Ancient and Modern). I did not leave till 12.30, and reached my bed about 1 a.m.’

  *

  When the bombings of London began, Williams was deeply saddened by the damage done to his beloved City. ‘Did you see that Bourne and Hollingsworth’s was bombed?’ he wrote to his wife in September 1940. ‘To think that we were there a week ago today! O you my heart and London my love! it is shocking not to be there.’ And a few months later: ‘Things are a little gloomy here today because no-one knows whether anything of Amen House is left. When I had your letter about taxis and cinemas this morning and was thinking of A. H. being no more, I very nearly broke down altogether. It wasn’t only A. H.; it was all my poor loved City! St Bride’s and St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe and the Guildhall! O well ——!’