The Inklings

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by Humphrey Carpenter


  Yet the City of his imagination and his writings did not ultimately depend on the City of London for its existence and its fertility as a symbol, and when he actually spent five nights in London during the height of the Blitz and, from the balcony of his Hampstead flat, watched the docks go up in flames, he experienced a curious sense of detachment. He told Anne Ridler: ‘I said to myself, “London is burning”, but produced no thrill, though there was a sense of crisis, due however (I fear) to the knowledge that it would make a good landmark that night. Living in history is as inconvenient as living in love.’ His old association with London had been broken; to another friend he remarked: ‘Do me the high favour to consider Oxford also as the City.’

  London was no longer even tolerably safe for his wife Michal, and for a time she went to stay with her sister in Leicestershire. Later, during 1942, she came to Oxford and threw in her lot with the South Parks Road household. This time she was moderately happy there, though (as Williams remarked) ‘a little conscious of being superfluous’. Life was not particularly easy for him with Michal living in Oxford, not least because ‘Celia’ had returned from Java and often came into Southfield House to do part-time work for the Press. ‘It is a little nerve-racking,’ he told Anne Ridler, ‘for I never know which day in the week C. is likely to come in, and I refuse to tell Michal never to come to the office except on Saturday mornings. However I take refuge in the Holy Ghost – who limits my actual seeing of Celia to an hour in six weeks; so that my quiescence is fairly undisturbed.’ He was also worried by the difficulty of looking after his son Michael, who was by now a rebellious and unhappy late-adolescent, and who spent some time with his father in the Spalding household in Oxford before a brief and miserable time in the R.A.F. One day at about this period, Williams rediscovered a horoscope which somebody had cast for him many years before. ‘Venus is weak,’ he noted ironically; ‘I might be “happier and more successful unmarried” (only I should have done nothing) …’ And indeed just at this time, when he was beginning a long-planned book on Dante and Romantic Theology (which had been commissioned for Faber & Faber by T. S. Eliot) he found, as he had so often found, his wife’s presence a strangely stabilising influence. After the book was finished, he reminded Michal that it ‘was written with You about, and it’s been the only good book I’ve done since ’39.’

  The Figure of Beatrice was indeed one of the finest books he had written: an interpretation of Dante’s writings as a poetic account of that Way of Affirmation by which romantic love may lead to the truly selfless love of God. Before he began writing it, Williams made the ‘hideous confession’ that ‘I do not want to read Dante through again!’ (He did not share Lewis’s delight in re-reading masterpieces of literature in their entirety, preferring to concentrate on what he considered the most important passages.) And when the book was finished he reported that Eliot ‘is being a Pest’ in saying that the introductory chapter was obscure and should be rewritten. ‘Now Lewis says it is the clearest thing I have ever written and forbids me to touch it. He even told my wife that the whole book was extraordinarily clear, “which has not always been, Mrs Williams, a virtue of your husband’s work”.’

  Lewis had no notion that Williams’s marriage was anything other than entirely happy. He took at face value Williams’s elaborately chivalrous manner of referring to Michal, and told Arthur Greeves that Williams ‘is, I think, youthfully in love with his wife still.’ Later he wrote of Williams’s ‘brilliantly happy marriage’. It was an understandable error, for to most of his friends Williams made much of his devotion to Michal – in contrast with the reserved or even off-hand manner with which Lewis’s other married acquaintances often referred to their wives. Indeed, had Lewis been privy to any of the six hundred and eighty or so letters written by Williams to his wife during the war, he would have found scarcely a word to suggest that all was not well with the marriage. Quite the opposite, for the letters (signed with the pet-name ‘Serge’) were full of poetic endearments. ‘It is fresh fire, as well as fresh springs, which leap in you,’ he wrote to Michal in a typical passage. ‘Your Excellency is to consider that few women retain the fresh fire of nature and super-nature so long. It is on such beauty of sanctity as yours that the whole Church depends.’ It is only when one finds him using almost identical terms when writing to many of his female disciples and friends, and when one discovers him referring almost brusquely to Michal when addressing someone who was truly in his confidence (‘Separation is bad for her, and I dare say not too good for me’), that one realises that these letters of devotion were in a sense little more than another image thrown up by Williams’s kaleidoscopic mind. Not that they were in any way an act of hypocrisy or self-deception. Despite the tension and unhappiness that coloured much of his married life, he still, by his most candid admission, needed Michal. He wrote to Raymond Hunt, a faithful follower from London days who was fully in his confidence about ‘Celia’ and the true state of the marriage: ‘My great difficulty with her [Michal] has been that she is always uncertain whether I shouldn’t do very well without her. The answer (I have always maintained) is that I should if in that case I “did” at all. Rather like religion, perhaps; one would be better without it, only then one would not “be”.’ And very near the end of the war he spoke to Thelma Shuttleworth about the sense of impoverishment caused by his separation from Michal during much of the time between 1939 and 1945: ‘More than one ever dreamed or thought – though one thought it a good deal — one, or at least I know I, depended on my wife; and flying visits, however frequent, are not the mutual exchange of unseen life. And one’s distinguished friend at Magdalen – however good and useful – is not that steady unnoticeable nourishment and repose …’

  *

  The success of Williams’s Oxford lectures on Milton, especially the one on Chastity, was not merely a passing phenomenon. ‘I have seen his impress on the Milton papers when I examined,’ Lewis reported to a friend some months after the lectures. ‘Fancy an Oxford student, and a girl, writing about Mammon’s speech in Book II: “Mammon proposes an ordered state of sin with such majesty of pride that but for the words live to ourselves which startle our consciences we should hardly recognise it as a sin, so natural it is to man.” Compare that with the sort of bilge you and I were proud to write in Schools.’

  On no one was the effect of the lectures more marked than on Lewis himself. Since his conversion, his own orthodox and supernaturalist Christian faith had already inclined him to accept the theology of Paradise Lost almost in its entirety, and to dismiss as irrelevant the reservations held by many modern critics of the poem. Then came Williams’s own lectures, which Lewis attended and which (as he reported) ‘partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified and matured, what I had long been thinking about Milton’. Shortly afterwards, Lewis wrote A Preface to Paradise Lost.

  It was in fact not so much a ‘preface’ to a reading of the poem as a defence of it against contemporary critics. In passing, it also included an attack on modern poetry, delivered in Lewis’s most Chestertonian manner: ‘While the moderns have been pressing forward to conquer new territories of consciousness, the old territory, in which alone man can live, has been left unguarded, and we are in danger of finding the enemy in our rear.’ The book was in fact far more characteristic of Lewis than of Williams. Nevertheless it had a very real debt to Williams’s ideas, and Lewis acknowledged that debt with characteristic generosity in the dedication: ‘Apparently the door of the prison was really unlocked all the time; but it was only you who thought of trying the handle. Now we can all come out.’

  When Williams read this, he remarked: ‘I will go so far as to say I have turned a few handles – let us pray, heavenly.’ Writing to Raymond Hunt about Lewis, he added: ‘I should never have written the book, and in scholarship he is far more competent than I; after all, he was struggling towards the truth when I was flung across his path.’ Later, when the book was published, Williams was a little distressed to fin
d that the reviews treated Lewis rather than Williams himself as the critic who was restoring the poem to its former place. But he declared, ‘The main point is Milton, and whether C. S. L. or I is of no importance.’ He also told Raymond Hunt, with a characteristically half-mocking half-serious use of the ceremonial plural: ‘The restoration of Milton criticism to its proper balance is but a side-accident of Our existence; not Our chief affair.’ His ‘chief affair’ was of course the writing of Taliessin and, as the months passed, further poems for the second volume came into existence, but only slowly. ‘Meanwhile,’ he told Anne Ridler, ‘Mr Eliot thinks I should do a novel.’ But still he could not think of a subject.

  Lewis meanwhile could think of a novel. Indeed it arose partly out of his writing A Preface to Paradise Lost. When considering Milton’s treatment of the Fall and pondering the purpose of the ‘fruit of that forbidden tree’, he came to the conclusion that ‘the only point of forbidding it was to instil obedience’. In fact at one point in his book on Milton he moved into the realm of fiction with an imaginative account of what might have happened had Adam and Eve remained unfallen and immortal, and had the later peoples of the world made an occasional pilgrimage to Eden:

  To you or to me, once in a lifetime perhaps, would have fallen the almost terrifying honour of coming at last, after long journeys and ritual preparations and slow ceremonial approaches, into the very presence of the great Father, Priest, and Emperor of the Planet Tellus; a thing to be remembered all our lives.

  To this preoccupation with the nature of an unfallen Adam and Eve was added his recurring mental picture of floating islands; the two merged, and the result was the planet Perelandra, where the human pair have not yet fallen, where there are floating islands and a forbidden ‘fixed land’, and where (even as the story begins) the power of evil, dwelling in a human space-voyager, arrives to attempt to bring about yet another Fall.1

  Perelandra was begun soon after the completion of the Milton book, but it was not published until 1943.2 For many years, Lewis considered it to be his best piece of fiction, and Tolkien shared this high opinion of it, telling his daughter that he thought it a great work of literature. The Fall was indeed a subject that occupied Tolkien’s imagination as much as it did Lewis’s – as Tolkien himself said, his own books were largely about it – and in 1945 he wrote to his son Christopher: ‘Partly as a development of my own thought, partly in contact with C. S. L., and in various ways, not least the firm guiding hand of Alma Mater Ecclesia, I do not now feel ashamed or dubious on the Eden “myth”. It has not, of course, historicity of the same kind as the New Testament, but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of “exile”.’

  When Tolkien’s daughter Priscilla read Perelandra, she told her father that she thought the hero, the philologist Ransom who had also played a central part in Out of the Silent Planet, was surely meant to be a portrait of him. Tolkien replied: ‘As a philologist, I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him.’ And he was quite sure that the names which Lewis gave the Adam and Eve of Perelandra, ‘Tor and Tinidril’, were ‘certainly an echo’ of his own ‘Tuor and Idril’ in The Silmarillion. He might have added that Ransom’s first name, ‘Elwin’, was a version of the Old English Ælfwine or ‘elf-friend’, a name that appeared in early versions of The Silmarillion. Lewis often liked to make such faint allusions to his friends, and Perelandra contained an even more direct example in the naming of the doctor as ‘Humphrey’, a kind of private tribute to Havard. The book was also deeply concerned with Tolkien and Lewis’s notion that mythology can be ‘true’. Indeed, the story was largely arranged to demonstrate the possibility that ‘what was myth in one world might always be fact in another’.

  By the time that Perelandra was published, Lewis was becoming well known as a speaker on Christianity. The BBC’s Religious Broadcasting Director much admired The Problem of Pain, and he invited Lewis to give a series of radio talks on Christian belief. Lewis accepted, though not without misgivings, and he delivered a series of four broadcasts entitled ‘Right and Wrong: A Clue to the meaning of the Universe?’ from the studio in London on Wednesday evenings in August 1941. The talks began, as did The Problem of Pain, by ‘proving’ the existence of God, or at least by advancing Lewis’s profound belief that the existence of Reason or Conscience in the human mind indicates that we are not merely slaves to instinct but are fundamentally aware of a Moral Law that comes from God. They also included a characteristic attack on Progress. ‘If you look at the present state of the world,’ Lewis told his listeners, ‘it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.’

  Lewis was not exactly at his best at the microphone; or rather, his use of the medium emphasised the more dogmatic side of his character. Radio brought out neither his stentorian power nor his flashes of wit, and his broadcasting manner was formal and rather restrained. But he spoke clearly and unhesitatingly, and the talks were considered a great success, not least because of the large number of letters which resulted from them, and which Lewis answered with characteristic patience and promptness. Indeed anybody, adult or child, who ever wrote to him to thank him for his books, or to raise a point relating to them, or to ask his advice on a personal or spiritual problem, always found that he replied virtually by return of post, writing briefly and to the point but with limitless sympathy and patience. As he became better known for his Christian apologetics, letter writing came to take up a large proportion of his time, but he never delayed in answering, so that it might be said that he did as much to help people in this way as he did by writing his books.

  Following the radio talks, Lewis was asked to address young men at a number of Royal Air Force stations around the country. He accepted, and found the task exhausting and by no means to his liking, but he undertook it whenever he could manage to do so. He told a friend that the first of these lectures on Christianity was ‘a complete failure’, but consoled himself by ‘remembering that God used an ass to convert the prophet’. He was also asked by Sister Penelope of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage, with whom he had corresponded for some time, to address the junior nuns at the convent. ‘What very odd tasks God sets us!’ he remarked to her. ‘If anyone had told me ten years ago that I should be lecturing in a convent ——! The doors do open outwards as well, I trust?’ He remained lifelong friends with Sister Penelope, and it was to her and her fellow nuns that Perelandra was dedicated in the words ‘To some ladies at Wantage’. The translator of the Portugese edition delighted the sisters by mistranslating this ‘To some wanton ladies’.

  In 1942 and 1944 Lewis gave more radio talks, on ‘What Christians Believe’, ‘Christian Behaviour’, and ‘The Christian View of God’. They met with an even greater success than the first series, not least because of the popularity of Screwtape which was now in print. These later broadcasts, like the first ones, were not notable for their subtlety. Lewis said of them, ‘I had to go like a bull at a gate’, and in many of them he adopted a very bellicose manner. ‘Christianity is a fighting religion,’ he declared. ‘This moment is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.’

  Charles Williams listened to these broadcasts, and was not entirely enthusiastic about Lewis’s rather broad approach to the subject. ‘I do not think the BBC is my medium,’ he remarked. ‘One has to be too rashly general. I have observed how even C. S. L. has to omit (because of time) points of some seriousness. For example, he made some play with this business of trusting Reason: “If you trust Reason …” and so on. I reminded him of the pure agnostic answer – “But I do not trust reason, not so far”. But there was not “time”. Quite true, but i
f I had been a listener I should have lost real interest when I realized that he had just left it out.’ Williams was aware of a certain difference of manner between himself and Lewis where the ‘preaching’ of Christianity was concerned. Writing to Anne Ridler, he referred to this (in a fashion that trod his usual narrow line between pride and humility). He had, he told her, been helping two young women. One of them ‘had been, it appeared, praying for “grace to believe”, but the grace had not consciously shown itself; and so what? I could not resist making the suggestion that, in the circumstances, might not I (most unworthily) be the grace? Anyhow she is now labouring to believe. Both of them began by admiring C. S. L.; both of them (he said blushing) convey somehow a faint impression of advancing in the grades – absurd but flattering.’

  Tolkien was not entirely enthusiastic about Lewis’s broadcasts, or at least about the sort of attention they attracted. ‘Lewis is as energetic and jolly as ever,’ he told his son Christopher, who in the later part of the war went to South Africa to train as an Air Force pilot, ‘but getting too much publicity for his or any of our tastes. “Peterborough”, usually fairly reasonable, did him the doubtful honour of a peculiarly misrepresentative and asinine paragraph in the Daily Telegraph of Tuesday last. It began “Ascetic Mr Lewis——”!!! I ask you! He put away three pints in a very short session this morning, and said he was “going short for Lent”.’

  *

  Towards the end of the war the morning sessions of the Inklings were by no means restricted to Tuesdays at the Bird and Baby. Indeed they were likely to meet on almost any morning at almost any pub. The ‘Bird’ was closed for a time because of the beer shortage, itself caused largely by thirsty American troops waiting for D-Day; and the Inklings often gathered in the King’s Arms opposite the Bodleian Library, in the tap room of the Mitre Hotel, or in the White Horse in Broad Street, a small pub next to Blackwell’s book shop which offered almost as much seclusion as the ‘Bird’.

 

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