Roy Campbell reappeared at the Bird and Baby once or twice, and came to the Inklings again in 1946. But another visitor made an even briefer appearance, and not strictly at an Inklings meeting. This was T. S. Eliot, whom Charles Williams had been eager to introduce to Lewis for some time. They met over tea at the Mitre Hotel one day in the last months of the war. Eliot’s opening remark scarcely delighted Lewis: ‘Mr Lewis, you are a much older man than you appear in photographs.’ The tea party progressed poorly, and was enjoyed by no one except Charles Williams, who seemed to be immensely amused.
*
Williams had intended since 1940 to write another novel. His last, Descent into Hell, had been published in 1937, and T. S. Eliot had been trying for some time to get another commissioned for publication by Faber’s. Indeed Eliot now regarded himself as Williams’s patron. ‘I really launched him,’ he told a friend; and he tried to see that Williams concentrated on major work rather than wasting his energies in potboilers. For a long time Williams stalled on the novel, for he was still unable to make up his mind about a subject, and it was not until 1943 that at last he had ‘a kind of ghostly skeleton of a novel’ in his mind. He wanted to progress beyond the achievement of Descent into Hell, and a logical sequel to that book with its graphic account of damnation would be (as he remarked to a friend) a kind of Paradiso, an account of heaven. He was after all approaching his sixtieth birthday, and as he said to his wife in February 1940, he did have ‘a hovering sense that my work is now all but done’. Yet he said of the new novel, ‘I doubt if I can do heaven. An account of the Timeless in terms of time is bound to seem silly.’ And when he eventually began to write, the book seemed not so much like a fitting conclusion to his series of novels as like his early and rather mediocre work.
He began work on it in the late summer of 1943, and by the beginning of September he was writing the third chapter. The story told how the body of a young woman is found in an empty London house during the blitz, a body that dissolves into dust and water when a post-mortem is held. This strange corpse is the product of an attempt by some demonic power to create a human being, this being an idea that had long interested Williams; he mentioned it in his book Witchcraft. The opening chapters of this new novel were read to Lewis and Tolkien. Williams also showed the manuscript to his wife, whose opinion he always respected in such matters; and she was quite firm. She thought the whole draft was poor stuff: as indeed it was, by the standard of his recent work. Williams agreed, and had few regrets. ‘Three quarters of my mind is delighted that we are so at one about my discarded chapters,’ he told her; ‘the other quarter is sad about the wasted work. Two months almost thrown away! But perhaps something better may come.’
A few days later he began the novel all over again from the beginning. ‘I am not much happier,’ he told Michal. ‘It’s all so dull.’ It was not dull; it was one of the finest things he had written.
It opened with a girl standing on Westminster Bridge, a dead girl (though she scarcely knows it at first), who has just been killed by an aeroplane which has crashed down on the Embankment; a surprising accident, for the war is over. ‘It was true that formal peace was not yet in being; all that had happened was that fighting had ceased.’ Sudden death was no longer expected; yet Lester Furnival is dead, and the novel tells of her strange adventures in that other and supernatural City which, as Williams had long believed, lies alongside the physical London and occasionally crosses paths with it. The novel was not precisely about heaven, but if it was not his Paradiso, All Hallows’ Eve (as he named it) proved to be Williams’s triumphant Purgatorio.
He was reading the new draft aloud to the Inklings in November 1943. ‘I heard two chapters of a new novel by Charles Williams, read by him, this morning,’ Tolkien told his son Christopher. Years later he recalled of those readings: ‘I was in fact a sort of assistant midwife at the birth of All Hallows’ Eve, read alound to us as it was composed, but the very great changes made in it were I think mainly due to C. S. L.’ They were in fact mainly due to Michal Williams.
Williams found it hard work writing the book. The considerable attention which he had paid to problems of style while composing the poems for his second Taliessin volume (now almost complete) made him self-conscious about his prose style in the novel, and he was severely critical. ‘A style suitable to us in our last period takes some finding,’ he told Michal. ‘I have (you will excuse this) a dark feeling that there is something I ought to be saying, a kind of unity of all – but don’t know what it is.’ Yet he progressed. ‘I have pushed slowly on,’ he told Michal in January 1944, adding, ‘I have read some of it to C. S. L.-Tolkien (you will forgive that; and excuse its technical usefulness) who admire and approve.’
Lewis too was writing a story concerned with Purgatory, or at least with the point of balance between Heaven and Hell. Tolkien recorded of a meeting of the Inklings in April 1944 (by which time Warnie Lewis was at work on the first of his books of French history): ‘All turned up except Cecil, and we stayed until after midnight. The best entertainment proved to be the chapter of Major Lewis’ projected book – on a subject that does not interest me: the court of Louis XIV; but it was most wittily written (as well as learned). I did not think so well of a chapter of C. S. L.’s new moral allegory or “vision”, based on the mediæval fancy of the Refrigerium, by which the lost souls have an occasional holiday in Paradise.’
Lewis modelled his story (at first entitled ‘Who Goes Home’ but eventually published as The Great Divorce) at least in part on Dante, whose works he had known very well since he and Colin Hardie, the Classical Tutor at Magdalen, had read them aloud together in weekly evening sessions just before the war.1 But this in itself was not calculated to please Tolkien, who remarked, albeit in old age: ‘Dante doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don’t care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.’
Tolkien himself was now once again in full spate with The Lord of the Rings. A lengthy period of mental dryness came to an end when Lewis persuaded him to tackle the story again; he reported in March 1944 that Lewis ‘is putting the screw on me to finish’, and a few days later: ‘I have begun to nibble at Hobbit again.’ He began work on what was eventually to be Book IV of the story, recounting Frodo, Sam and Gollum’s journey to Mordor. He was soon reading the new chapters aloud to the Inklings, and was receiving the usual mixed reactions of great enthusiasm from some and considerable reservations from others, the latter including Hugo Dyson, who had never cared for the story – not that Dyson liked any readings on Thursday nights; his preference for talk was well known. Tolkien wrote on 14 May: ‘I saw C. S. L. from 10.45 to 12.30 this morning, heard two chapters of his “Who Goes Home?”, and read my sixth new chapter “Journey to the Cross Roads” with complete approval.’ And on 31 May: ‘The Inklings meeting was very enjoyable. Hugo was there: rather tired-looking, but reasonably noisy. The chief entertainment was provided by a chapter of Warnie Lewis’s book on the times of Louis XIV (very good I thought it); and some excerpts from C. S. L.’s “Who Goes Home?” – a book on Hell, which I suggested should have been called rather “Hugo’s Home”.’
All Hallows’ Eve was sent to the publishers in May 1944. Five months later, the second volume of Williams’s Taliessin cycle was published under the title The Region of the Summer Stars. This volume consisted of eight long poems in which Williams came near to perfecting his style, and in which the themes of the myth were handled with the kind of ‘purged’ understatement reminiscent of Shakespeare’s last plays, which Williams had always regarded with special awe. Characteristic was Taliessin’s farewell to his Household in the poem ‘The Prayers of the Pope’:
Taliessin gathered his people before the battle.
‘Peers of the household,’ the king’s poet said,
‘dead now, save Lancelot, are the great lords
and the Table may end to-morrow; if it live,
it shall have new names in a new report.
&n
bsp; Short is Our time, though that time prove eternal.
Therefore now We dissolve the former bonds –’
the voice sounded, the hands descended – ‘We dissolve
the outer bonds; We declare the Company still
fixed in the will of all who serve the Company,
but the ends are on Us, peers and friends; We restore
again to God the once-permitted lieutenancy.’
The sales of the first volume of the cycle, Taliessin through Logres, had been so poor that Williams’s own employers the Oxford University Press, who had published it, declined to handle The Region of the Summer Stars, and it was passed to another publisher. Yet Williams had a suspicion that the success of The Figure of Beatrice and his high reputation in Oxford might improve matters this time. Even so, he was not prepared for the response to the new volume of poems. Pupils began to arrive for tutorials bearing copies for him to sign. Edith Sitwell wrote to say how impressed she was with it. The publishers of the book wrote to say that they had sold eight hundred copies in a month out of a first printing of one thousand, and would bring out a new edition next year. They also said that they would like more poems from Williams, and hoped that a further Taliessin volume could be published. Williams told Michal: ‘This selling of and passion for my verse is something altogether new, and I want to cry a little. I don’t say it’s much – but we have waited so long. Kiss me; you were the first to believe, and you always have.’
He did indeed plan a third volume in the cycle. Its poems were to be largely concerned with the Dolorous Blow and its relevance to the quest of the Graal. But he reported: ‘There are no more than 20 or 30 lines written’, and there was much else occupying his mind. He wanted to write a book on Wordsworth and ‘the Romantic Way in English verse’, and he offered the idea to his old friend and employer Sir Humphrey Milford at the Press. He was embittered when Milford turned it down on the grounds that Williams’s agent was demanding terms that were too high. ‘This, after so many years, seems to me a little unkind,’ Williams remarked to Anne Ridler. Not that he had any inflated idea of his status at the Press. He knew very well that his achievements passed for comparatively little there, and he was amused as well as saddened when, at a routine meeting at Southfield House, he and Milford and the others solemnly discussed whom they should ask to write a book on Shakespeare for the Home University Library. ‘Would you think there could be – here – more than one answer?’ he told Michal. ‘There could; there could, in fact, be any answer but that. We discussed A, B, and C, anyone except – Except – Of course they may think of me yet, but I think it unlikely. It’s a little strange to be superfluous when one has been Someone; in all the literary world there is no place where I am as negligible – in the most charming way – as here.’
His work in the editorial department at the Press was dull and sterile, and he himself knew that he had outstayed his usefulness. He felt he was wanted at Oxford by the university: no definite proposals had been made, but hints were frequently dropped that an academic job might be found for him after the war. Even Humphrey Milford ‘said he had heard a rumour that something was to be offered me’; Williams supposed that it might be a Readership in the English Faculty, or something similar which Lewis and his friends might have engineered. By now he knew that he would gladly stay in Oxford. He had no illusions about academic life, and in many ways he hated what he called Oxford’s ‘pseudo-culture’; but, as he said, the Inklings avoided all that. ‘How different the Magdalen feeling is from anywhere else in Oxford,’ he told Michal. And he no longer had any wish to go back to London. ‘I have no place-attachment now,’ he said. ‘This Oxford period has broken all that.’
Meanwhile there was a lot of work to be done, and he was tired. ‘I cannot quite describe the extreme effort which the act of writing seems to demand,’ he told Thelma Shuttleworth. ‘Verse now has to be thought and planned and considered and re-considered; prose needs writing two or three times when once was formerly enough. Like the Red Queen one has to run so very fast to remain in the same place.’ Eliot was waiting for a book on the history of the Arthurian myth. Dean Close School had commissioned, through the mediation of Sir Humphrey Milford, a biography of their founder Flecker: ‘For cash,’ Williams remarked wryly, adding, ‘All Caesar’s fault, bless him! He is always Caesar, but really, he and Celia do make all this Myth-living very difficult.’ And there were also the regular teaching commitments of lectures and tutorials, both of which were now more wearisome than enjoyable to Williams.
An old friend from Amen House days, Alice Mary Hadfield, came to see him in Oxford. ‘He had not changed at all,’ she said. ‘He was rather more thin and a little more withdrawn behind his face, and over the grey suit he wore a heel-length M.A.’s gown, since he came to meet me from his lecture. But he was still erect, swift, intent, the beautiful hands quick to mark and define, the forehead’s line unmarred by falling hair, the blue eyes behind their thick glasses as full of amusement and gentleness as ever.’ And he was soon at work on his next book, The Figure of Arthur, an account of the Arthurian legends in history and literature, together (as he planned) with an interpretation of his own Arthurian poems. On a couple of Monday mornings he read aloud what he had written to Tolkien and Lewis. Tolkien recalled of one of these morning sessions: ‘It was a bright morning, and the mulberry tree in the grove outside Lewis’s window shone like fallow gold against the cobalt blue sky.’ Lewis too described the scene: ‘Picture to yourself an upstairs sitting-room with windows looking north into the “grove” of Magdalen College on a sunshiny Monday morning in vacation at about ten o’clock. The Professor and I, both on the Chesterfield, lit our pipes and stretched out our legs. Williams in the arm-chair opposite to us threw his cigarette into the grate, took up a pile of the extremely small, loose sheets on which he habitually wrote – they came, I think, from a twopenny pad for memoranda – and began …’
Lewis himself had written yet another book. It was the third of the ‘Ransom’ stories, but it was very different in character from Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. It was in fact a celebration of everything that had happened in his life up to now. His old tutor Kirkpatrick was in it, as MacPhee, the sceptical Ulster Scot – ‘I have no opinions on any subject in the world. I state the facts and exhibit the implications.’ The Bloods of Malvern were in it, as the Inner Ring at the scientific research station Belbury, which threatens to overpower England. Lewis’s old Magdalen foe Harry Weldon was in it, as Lord Feverstone, taunting the hero Mark Studdock in the very words with which Weldon had mocked Lewis twenty years earlier – ‘Incurable romantic!’ Williams’s Arthurian mythology was in it, with Merlin’s supernatural powers ranged against Belbury, and the little company at the village of St Anne’s standing out against evil just as Logres in Williams’s poems stood out against the darkness of disordered Britain. ‘Something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres,’ Ransom tells his friends. ‘After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.’ Barfield was in it, for just a brief moment – ‘It is one of Barfield’s “ancient unities”,’ says Ransom, explaining the feelings between Mr Bultitude the bear and Pinch the cat. Tolkien’s mythology was in it: Merlin’s art is explained as ‘something brought to Western Europe after the fall of Numinor’. (‘A hearing error,’ remarked Tolkien, for he spelt the word ‘Númenor’.) And in a sense Charles Williams himself was in it, in the character of Ransom as now portrayed: a man of great spiritual strength, a man who easily earns obedience from his followers but is aware that this obedience may be dangerously seductive, a man of quietness and at the same time of great vigour. And on top of this the whole book had a schoolboy, almost pantomime quality, so much so that when Tolkien began to hear it read aloud by Lewis he thought it trivial. Yet when Tolkien had heard it right through he remarked that though it was scarcely a
proper conclusion to Lewis’s trilogy it was certainly ‘good in itself’. Good or bad – the book was damned by reviewers and hugely enjoyed by many readers – That Hideous Strength was the essence of Lewis and of his feelings about the Inklings.
*
The war gradually drew to an end. Blackout curtains were removed and street lighting was switched on. ‘I actually went out to an Inklings on Thursday night and rode in almost peacetime light all the way to Magdalen for the first time in five years,’ Tolkien noted. ‘Both Lewises were there, and C. W.; and beside some plesant talk, we heard the last chapter of Warnie’s book and an article of C. S. L., and a long specimen of his translation of Virgil.’ Lewis and Tolkien thought they might collaborate on a book. It was, Tolkien recorded, to be on the nature, origins, and function of language. The company also made plans to celebrate peace. ‘The Inklings have already agreed’, Tolkien told his son Christopher, ‘that their victory celebration, if they are spared to have one, will be to take a whole inn in the countryside for at least a week, and spend it entirely in beer and talk, without reference to any clock!’ They also began to organise contributions to a volume of essays which they were to present to Williams, to mark his return to London. For though he had no wish to leave Oxford, Williams had now reluctantly decided that he must go with the Press when it returned to Amen House after the war was finished, and continue to work there for the few years that remained until his retirement. He would after all lose his Press pension if he did anything else, and though his novel All Hallows’ Eve, just published, was proving very popular in Oxford, he could not seriously contemplate making ends meet for the rest of his life solely by writing books. He might perhaps be able to get himself elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford while still working in London; that was one hope. At all events he knew he must return to Amen House. ‘I am to have my old office – which on the whole I think I should prefer,’ he told Michal on 2 May 1945. ‘I shall linger there, a superfluous but kindly-treated – O well, don’t let’s be bad-tempered and resentful. We shall see how everything works out. Till Saturday. All love …’
The Inklings Page 26