The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Waite suggested that the teachings of Rudolf Steiner were associated with Rosicrucianism: ‘It has been reported that he derives from some German Order of the Rosy Cross.’ (ibid., p. 618). Waite did not, however, investigate this possible link between his own beliefs and Anthroposophy.

  1 Nor was it known by Alice Mary Hadfield, Williams’s friend and biographer, when she wrote An Introduction to Charles Williams (1959).

  2 Williams discusses the problems of what he calls the ‘Second Image’ of romantic love, by which he means the experience of falling in love a second time, after the first ‘Beatrician experience’ of love, in The Figure of Beatrice, his study of Dante and Romantic Theology (Faber & Faber, 1943): ‘The second image is not to be denied; we are not to pretend it is not there, or indeed to diminish its worth; we are only asked to free ourselves from concupiscence in regard to it … The first image was towards physical union; the second towards its separation. It repeats the first, in an opposite direction. But both movements are alike intense towards most noble Love: that is, towards the work of the primal Love in creation.’ (p.).

  1 Much of Williams’s early (i.e. pre-Taliessin through Logres) poetry shows the influence of Chesterton; e.g. Williams’s ‘Taliessin’s Song of Byzantion’ printed in Three Plays, p.:

  In the gate of Santa Sophia, amid patriarchs and popes

  I saw the Emperor sitting, and the smoke of earthly hopes

  went up to him as incense, and the tapers shone around

  as prayers before the Emperor, sitting aureoled and crowned.

  As God sits in the pictures that the monks on parchment draw,

  in pavilions over Sinai, giving Israel the law,

  or thrusting seas in order and firmaments in place,

  and the little devils hiding from the terror of his face;

  in the gate of Holy Wisdom, so I saw the Emperor sit … (etc.)

  1 Among those of Lady Ottoline’s guests who were ‘intimidated’ was Hugo Dyson. He was invited to Garsington Manor on several occasions when he was an undergraduate. Recalling these visits (in a radio broadcast fifty years later) he said that at Garsington he had encountered ‘all the people whom secretly one would have most desired to meet – and, as so often happened to a shy insignificant person, when one did meet them one was filled with a kind of terror. They were kindly enough, but I found them alarming. They weren’t, most of them, my weight. I do remember finding Virginia Woolf immensely beautiful and immensely frightening; and one of my fears – 1 don’t think I was quite alone in this – was that she would speak to me one day (but she never did).’ (In conversation with Roger Green, BBC Radio Oxford, May 1971.)

  Chapter 6

  1 It has been pointed out to me that Williams’s concept of Substitution may have been suggested by Kipling’s short story ‘The Wish House’, which was first published in 1924 and which tells the story of an old woman who makes a deal with a spirit or ‘token’ that she will bear all the pain of the man she loves, up to and including terminal cancer. Kipling’s blend of the modern with the supernatural probably had a wide influence on Williams’s imagination.

  2 For the breadth of subject-matter in Williams’s letters, see the many examples quoted below, in Part Three, Chapter 5.

  1 In the first chapter of his book The Descent of the Dove Williams certainly mentions with some enthusiasm the subintroductae of the early church, women who slept with their male companions without sexual intercourse. He says: ‘In some cases it failed. But we know nothing – most unfortunately – of the cases in which it did not fail.’ He calls the practice ‘dangerous but dangerous with a kind of heavenly daring’.

  1 Williams himself used ‘Peter Stanhope’ as a nom de plume for his religious drama Judgement at Chelmsford, and the character of Stanhope in Descent into Hell resembles Williams in many particulars. On the other hand Stanhope in the novel differs from Williams in that he enjoys success and fame almost on a par with Shakespeare.

  Chapter 8

  1 fen: the name of a section in Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine; also used by Chaucer in The Pardoner’s Tale.

  2 king or pope, wizard or emperor: Arthur, the Pope, Merlin, and the Emperor are four of the principal figures in the Taliessin poems.

  3 Mount Elburz: mentioned by Williams several times in the poems. This is his own note on it: ‘A Caucasian mountain: type of the lowness and height, fertility and chastity, verdure and snow, of the visible body.’ (Quoted by Lewis in Chapter 2 of ‘Williams and the Arthuriad’, Arthurian Torso.)

  4 The Throne, the war-lords etc.: reminiscent of Williams’s poem ‘The Vision of the Empire’ in Taliessin through Logres, except of course that to Williams these things are pleasing.

  1 Fylfot, or Chrysanthemum …: A ‘fylfot’ is a swastika; the Chrysanthemum and the Sun are Japanese emblems.

  2 The orthodox view is in fact that Taliessin was broadly speaking from the Arthurian period.

  1 a voyage in some swift bark …: Williams takes the figure of Taliessin from Celtic legend and makes him contemporary with Arthurian Britain and also the Byzantine Empire. He also literally takes him (briefly and swiftly) on a journey to Byzantium itself.

  2 beloved druid-poet: In Williams’s poems, Taliessin is associated with druidical origins. It has also been suggested that Williams himself was of Welsh descent, but his sister Edith Williams wrote: ‘So far as I know there is no “Welsh descent” anywhere in the family.’ (Charles Williams Society newsletter no. 3, autumn 1976, p.)

  3 Charles’ Wain: a name for the constellation more commonly called the Great Bear. It was also known as ‘Arthur’s Plough’.

  Chapter 9

  1 Lewis’s comments on the Moria Gate section of The Lord of the Rings are my own invention, though they are based on changes that Tolkien did make in the manuscript.

  1 Barfield’s later books are Saving the Appearances (1957), Worlds Apart (1963), Unancestral Voice (1965), Speaker’s Meaning (1967), and What Coleridge Thought (1973). All are concerned to some extent with the propagation of Anthroposophy; the first three explore Steiner’s teachings using different literary forms. Saving the Appearances is a conventionally-shaped philosophical dissertation; Worlds Apart is a symposium involving a number of fictional participants (the character of ‘Hunter’ is partly modelled on Lewis); Unancestral Voice might be described as a novel. Several of the books were published by Faber & Faber, and Barfield’s work was admired by T. S. Eliot.

  All these books were written during the period when partial retirement from his work as a solicitor permitted Barfield to devote his time to such things. In the pseudonymous This Ever Diverse Pair (published under the name of G. A. L. Burgeon in 1950) Barfield expressed his considerable unhappiness at the way in which his professional life in the legal business had prevented him from concentrating on writing.

  Chapter 10

  1 It is interesting to note how rarely Williams refers plainly to God, Christ, or the Devil. He prefers other terms. God is ‘the High God’, ‘the One Mover’; Christ is ‘the Crucified Jew’, ‘the Divine Hero’, ‘the Revealer’, ‘Messias’; the Devil is ‘the Enemy’, ‘the Infamy’. Particularly characteristic of Williams are the phrases ‘under the Protection’, ‘under the Mercy’, ‘under the Permission’.

  1 Owen Barfield feels that he might have found some common philosophical or theological ground with Charles Williams if he had ever had a chance to talk at length with him. But they never found the opportunity for a lengthy conversation. He recalls that at their first meeting, Williams, not knowing that Barfield was a disciple of Steiner, opened the conversation by saying: ‘I have just been talking to someone who told me I was an Anthroposophist’.

  Williams reviewed Barfield’s volume of essays Romanticism Comes of Age in 1945 (New English Weekly XXVII no. 4, 10 May 1945, pp.). The review was admiring in tone, but Williams concentrated on what Barfield had to say about the Romantic poets and did not discuss any questions relating specifically to Anthroposophy. Moreover on th
e subject of personal revelation, Williams once remarked (in a letter to Thelma Shuttleworth): ‘Intuition, or inner revelation, leads to anarchy.’

  1 For example in the fifth chapter of Arthurian Torso where Lewis declares that the wood of Broceliande in Williams’s Taliessin cycle ‘leads down to the world of D. H. Lawrence as well as up to the world of Blake’; and in the essay ‘Four-Letter Words’ (reprinted in Selected Literary Essays) when he writes: ‘Lady Chatterley has made short work of a prosecution by the Crown. It still has to face more formidable judges. Nine of them, and all goddesses’ (p.).

  1 He was certainly influenced in many ways by Owen Barfield. Note also the effect that Barfield’s Poetic Diction had on Tolkien (see above, p.).

  1 They were scarcely even that. Their informality, the fact that they had no constitution or even definable membership, cannot be stressed too strongly. R. E. Havard says, in a letter to the present writer: ‘We really had no corporate existence. In my view we were simply a group of C. S. L. ’s wide circle of friends who lived near enough to him to meet together fairly regularly. I think, perhaps, this should be made clear, as there does seem to be some tendency to take us all much more seriously than we took ourselves.’

  1 Some, but by no means all. Many dons’ wives were graduates, and in a few cases their scholarly ability equalled that of their husbands. Lewis’s view of women was modelled more closely on Mrs Moore and on Tolkien’s wife Edith than on university wives in general.

  1 The Problem of Pain, footnote to the first page of Chapter 6: ‘I by no means reject the view that the “efficient cause” of disease, or some disease, may be a created being other than man. In Scripture Satan is specially associated with disease in Job, in Luke xiii, 16, I Cor. v, 5, and (probably) in I Tim. i, 20.’

  Chapter 11

  1 The floating islands are mentioned by Lewis as the source of Perelandra in the transcript of a tape-recorded conversation with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss, printed in Of Other Worlds.

  2 Williams’s letters indicate that Lewis finished A Preface to Paradise Lost in the spring of 1941. In November of that year Lewis was writing the chapter of Perelandra in which Ransom meets the Lady.

  1 Gervase Mathew told Walter Hooper that he had attended Inklings meetings as early as 1939 or 1940, but there is no record of his attendance until 1946.

  1 Auden and Williams met briefly before the war, on publishing business. Auden was greatly impressed by Williams’s personality. When he came to read Williams’s books he found the novels ‘the least satisfactory’ and at first ‘could not make head or tail’ of the Taliessin poetry. But he thought The Figure of Beatrice ‘magnificent’, and regarded The Descent of the Dove as Williams’s masterpiece. See Auden’s introduction to The Descent of the Dove in the edition published by Living Age Books (Meridian Books, New York, 1956). Auden told Williams (as reported by Williams to his wife in a letter of 17 October 1940) that ‘he feels that I have a divine gift, and he seems to be regarding me as the father of his present verse; at least he says I am responsible for a good deal of it’.

  1 Raleigh was Professor of English Literature at Oxford before the First World War.

  1 Lewis wrote of The Great Divorce: ‘The meeting of the “Tragedian” with his wife is consciously modelled on that of Dante and Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio: i.e. it is the same predicament, only going wrong. I intended readers to spot these resemblances’ (letter to W. Kinter, 29 September 1951).

  Chapter 12

  1 i.e. the porter of St John’s, Wain’s own college.

  1 John Wain says that Lewis actually preferred the public bar of the Bird and Baby to the back parlour, which was really a private sitting-room offered only by kindness of Blagrove; but another of the Inklings rather officiously ‘booked’ the parlour for use on Tuesdays, and Lewis regretfully fell in with this arrangement. John Wain adds that Blagrove looked remarkably like Lewis, and that Lewis owned a photograph of Blagrove serving him across the bar with a pint of beer, the effect being of Lewis observing his reflection in a mirror.

  1 Lewis himself would have laughed at this comment, on the grounds that it accepts uncritically the notion that change means improvement.

  1 Cecil adds: ‘His serious literary taste was also nineteenth century; but that of a mid-nineteenth century scholar and man of letters. He liked the grand, the noble, or the Romantic: Homer, Virgil, Milton, also Spenser, Malory, etc. – though he also did get a great deal of pleasure from writers as different as Lamb and Jane Austen. But his taste did stop about 1890. It was not just that he disliked the post-1914 writers – Joyce, Lawrence, etc. I don’t think he cared for Henry James or Hardy or Conrad. This always interested me.’ (Letter to the present writer, January 1978.)

  1 That Hideous Strength, Chapter 17; omitted in the version of the book that Lewis himself abridged for the paperback edition.

  1 Lewis took advantage of the journey to explore Durham, and from what he saw there came at least something of the description of ‘Edgestow’ in That Hideous Strength. Warnie Lewis, who accompanied his brother, wrote in his diary (on 24 February 1943) that Durham’s ‘exquisite beauty came upon us with an impact I shall long remember. The University lies all about and around the cathedral, and was of a totally unexpected attractiveness.’

  1 The detailed history of the Cambridge election is rather complicated. There were two Oxford men on the Cambridge board of electors, Tolkien and F. P. Wilson. It appears that initially Lewis was regarded as the obvious choice, and Tolkien was asked to sound him out. He presumably reported that Lewis was unwilling to leave Oxford, for on 18 May 1954 Helen Gardner was offered the chair. She was uncertain whether to accept, having just been elected to a readership at Oxford. Meanwhile Lewis apparently heard that she was being considered, and this seems to have moved him to change his mind, for rumour reached her that he was now prepared to accept. Hearing this, she declined the chair, and he was elected.

  Chapter 13

  1 See Letters of C. S. Lewis, p., where he discusses this view; also the chapter on ‘Christian Marriage’ in Mere Christianity.

  1 There seems to be no conclusive evidence as to whether the marriage was consummated.

  1 Warnie Lewis’s books are: The Splendid Century: some aspects of French life in the reign of Louis XIV (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953); The Sunset of the Splendid Century: the life and times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine, 1670-1736 (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955); Assault on Olympus: The Rise of the House of Gramont between 1604 and 1678 (Andre Deutsch, 1958); Louis XIV: An Informal Portrait (Andre Deutsch, 1959); The Scandalous Regent: A Life of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, 1674-1723, and of bis family (Andre Deutsch, 1961); Levantine Adventurer: the travels and missions of the Chevalier d’Arvieux, 1653-1697 (Andre Deutsch, 1962); and an edition of the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon (B. T. Batsford, 1964). The author’s name is given as W. H. Lewis.

  1 Dante of Beatrice: ‘Then she turned to the eternal fountain.’ Paradiso, XXXI, 93.

  INDEX

  The page numbers in this index relate to the printed version of this book; they do not match the pages of your ebook. You can use your ebook reader’s search tool to find a specific word or passage.

  Abercrombie, Lascelles 159

  Acton, Harold 20

  Addison’s Walk 42–4

  Aldiss, Brian 182

  Aldwinckle, Stella 214

  Allott, Kenneth 225

  Amen House 86 ff and passim

  Amis, Kingsley 182n.

  Anscombe, Elizabeth 216–17

  Anthroposophy 36, 47n., 65, 81n.

  Arnold, Matthew 64, 214

  Atlantis 4

  Auden, W. H. 158, 188, 225

  Austen, Jane 144–5, 219n.

  Ayer, A. J. 215

  Balder 4–5, 43–4

  Barfield, Owen, summary of life 255; character 33; becomes friends with Lewis 12; reads Lewis’s early poetry 16; walking tours with Lewis 33–6; becomes an Anthroposophist 36–7; ‘Great War’ (debate w
ith Lewis) 37; influence on Lewis and Tolkien 41–2; awareness of change in Lewis 60–2; enters legal profession 64–5; rare visitor to Inklings 131; at Thursday Inklings 177–8; relationship with Williams 155n.; joins Church of England 155; Poetic Diction 41–3, 63, 158; later books 153n.; and passim

  Barth, Karl 134–5

  Battle of Maldon 15, 19

  Bayley, Peter 120, 217, 219, 241, 244, 251

  Belfast, Lewis’s childhood in 3–8

  Benecke, P. V. M. 17

  Bennett, J. A. W. 205, 255, 214, 229

  Beowulf 19, 25–6, 59, 128, 176

  Betjeman, John 19–21

  ‘Bird and Baby’ 122, 130, 185, 191, 203, 208–9, 226, 229, 231 and passim

  Blagrove, Charles 209

  Blake, William 19, 74, 187

  Blunden, Edmund 161, 229

  Bogarde, Dirk 214

  Bowra, Maurice 20, 188

  Braunholtz, G. E. K. 27

  Brett-Smith, H. F. B. 56n.

  Brewer, Derek 217

  Brightman, F. E. 142

  Brooke, Rupert 158

  Bryson, John 27–8

  Buchan, John 145, 158

  Bunyan, John 47, 244

  Campbell, Roy 191–2

  Cassirer, Ernst 42

  Cave, The 56

  Cecil, David, summary of life 255–6; 186–7, 209, 219, 228–31

  Chambers, E. K. 163

  Chambers, R. W. 98

  Chaucer, Geoffrey 24, 59, 121, 124n.

  Chesterton, G. K. 47n., 51, 61, 94, 135, 155, 159, 181, 217–18, 221, 244

  Christie, Julie 214

  Coalbiters, The 27–8, 55–6

  Coghill, Nevill, summary of life 256; meets Lewis 15; becomes Fellow of Exeter College 16; takes part in anti-Eliot prank 21; helps Lewis to publish Dymer 22; joins Coalbiters 27–8; introduces Dyson to Lewis 42; dines with Lewis brothers and Tolkien 56; lecturing manner 59; persuades Lewis to read The Place of the Lion 98; attendance at Inklings 131, 135–6, 185, 241