The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  And yet it would be wrong to call Williams a fully dedicated magician. He remained ambivalent about magic to the end of his life. He distrusted occult power, for it threatened to usurp the power proper to God. What appealed to him—what thrilled him—apart from the ceremonies, which he entered into with gusto, was the promise of real, immediate, spiritual transformation, the Christian metanoia so seemingly unattainable in the mundane world but held out so tantalizingly in the esoteric subworld. Williams sought in Christian magic the same radical transformation that he tried to achieve by changing the names of his friends, lovers, and coworkers, but on a higher plane; instead of symbolically converting the everyday Florence into the biblical Michal or Sir Humphrey Milford into the imperial Caesar, he could transform the everyday Charles Williams, through magical means, into a genuine Christian bard and psychopomp.

  The Theology of Romance

  All the while he immersed himself in magic, Williams was a communicating Anglican. This unusual dual practice set his mind afire. He drew energy from the cross-pollination of church services and Rosy Cross rituals, and his mind soon bubbled with new ideas for poetry, literary criticism, and theological exploration. By 1924, he was hard at work on Outlines of Romantic Theology, a book that he believed would “probably affect profoundly the whole thought of the Universal Church.” There is self-deprecating sarcasm in this remark—Williams was thinking of the critical indifference to The Silver Stair—but also seriousness. He intended to present in all its splendor his great new discovery, the Way of Affirmation, to show how Christianity sanctifies romantic love, and particularly married love, as a path to God.

  The main line of Williams’s argument can be simply put: sexual love, especially when sealed by Christian marriage, “is capable of being assumed into sacramental and transcendental heights.” As an incarnational faith, Christianity necessarily glorifies the body, and thus marriage came to be counted a sacrament. But for various historical reasons—Williams mentions the Church’s emphasis upon asceticism and otherworldliness, as well as residual Manicheanism—theology has paid scant attention to marriage’s sacramental nature; the deepest meaning of marriage, as a Way to God, has been lost or obscured. It is not difficult to see, in this thesis, Williams the magician plumbing unknown or forgotten secrets in order to transform the world.

  Williams bases his views of marriage, curiously, upon the celibate life of Christ. He presents Christ as the embodiment of love, the stages of Christ’s life as akin to those of a marriage, married men and women as akin to the disciples and to “the whole company of the faithful.” In support, he enlists Dante, the Morte d’Arthur, Donne, the theology of the Mass, and the consummate Victorian poet of marriage, Coventry Patmore. Not all his arguments convince: the parallels he draws between Christ’s life and married life are forced, as he himself realizes, writing that “until this study has been developed further by the Mind of the Church, some of these identifications must be tentative.” Nonetheless, Outlines of Romantic Theology impresses with its polemical and visionary force, which crests when Williams declares that his understanding of marriage will usher in an Age of Romantic Theology. This exalted claim may lift eyebrows, but at least Williams attempts to give his forecast a practical footing by describing a method for spiritual transformation, the first stage being meditation upon the presence of God in moments of married bliss, the second strict adherence during marriage to the ordinary rites of the Christian faith.

  An ambitious project! Alas, such things have a way of bumping up against reality. Williams was unable to find a publisher; Milford turned down Outlines of Romantic Theology, saying that “I fear this is not for us. It may be for all time and I may be like the poor Indian, but I am afraid of it and of you.” At the same time, Williams’s marriage was proving less glorious than romantic theology admitted. He noted that his horoscope urged celibacy as the best course; but he believed that if he had followed this advice, his life’s work might have foundered at the outset—for romantic love can lead not only to God but, as Dante shows, to artistic excellence. In 1922, Florence gave birth to their first and only child, Michael. She adored the baby. Williams loved him with reservations, complaining that “a child is a guest of a somewhat insistent temperament, rather difficult to get rid of, almost pushing; a poor relation of a rather pleasant kind. His little voice pulls at my ears; my heartstrings are unplucked.” The boy failed to relight the hearth; he annoyed his father, who was obliged to write in the early morning hours, after everyone had fallen asleep, and his mother also grew more testy, perhaps from lack of sleep, for now Williams regularly awoke her in the darkest hours of the night to fix him tea. The marriage had received a boost, but only briefly. Something was missing, at least in Williams’s view.

  Enter Phyllis or Phillida or Celia

  Always restless, Williams negotiated with the London City Council to deliver evening lectures to the public, a plan that would fulfill his desire to pass on his ideas and also keep him away from the baby during some of its crankiest hours. The future was bright, and it brightened still more when, out of the blue, the missing Something appeared. It came in a most unexpected form, not as the foreordained next step in marriage’s silver stairs to God, but in the alluring person of the new, comely librarian at OUP, Phyllis Jones. She had fair hair, blue eyes, a pointed nose, and intelligent eyes; Williams spotted her, tumbled for her, and anointed her Phillida (“greenery”) and Celia (“heavenly”). He composed for her one hundred poems, which he called “A Century of Poems for Celia”; in them he declares his adoration, he longs for embraces, he apotheosizes her as holy wisdom, immaculate perfection, “Christhood” incarnate.

  Phyllis attended his lectures, marveled at his energy and intellect, and fell entirely under his spell. He became the Teacher, she the Disciple. Their ardor intensified; the very air danced; an acquaintance spotted the two walking together and saw around them “a radiance rising … almost a golden mist.” They sent passionate letters back and forth; he called her “my saint, my hero, my beauty.” For Williams, this was his portal into the joy that his master Dante had known, a taste of romantic love at its most splendid and pure. In his introduction to The New Book of English Verse (1935), he would coin the term “Celian moment” to signify instances of spiritual or artistic illumination, “the moment which contains, almost equally, the actual and the potential; it is perfect within its own limitations of subject or method, and its perfection relates it to greater things. It is the moment of passion…” It was, indeed, the moment of passion, but of a passion never to be consummated. Williams remained true to his marriage vows, and he and Phyllis never advanced beyond embraces. The final gift of himself he reserved, throughout his life and without hesitation, for Florence.

  For a while, though, he knew bliss supreme. His happiness with OUP and with Phyllis brimmed over in the late 1920s into three lighthearted masques, composed for performance at Amen House in front of Milford and the assembled staff. In these pieces—plays with music and dance, designed to be performed once only—Williams blended Christian, Greek, and Arthurian motifs in his continuing aspiration to elevate a publishing house, its occupants, and its labors to mythic proportions. In The Masque of the Manuscript, performed on Milford’s birthday in 1927, the story of how an obscure book on Syrian nouns makes its way from initial appraisal to final publication becomes a tale of ritualized death and rebirth. Alice Hadfield thought that “the effect of the Masque on C.W.’s position in the Press and with Sir Humphrey was incalculable. The atmosphere was changed from that of an office to a court, with Caesar on the throne and C.W. among the paladins.” Williams had worked magic, merging myth and reality, revealing to all the staff their higher selves, sending them into “an extraordinary state of delight and exaltation.”

  The inspiration for the success, he had no doubt, was Phyllis. At first this may seem another instance of “a man and his muse,” as in the case of Williams’s contemporary, Robert Graves, who required a succession of women to stimulate hi
s indwelling genius. But for Williams, schooled in Dante, a woman, be she platonic lover or spouse, was a manifestation of God’s glory and, more important, a guiding light on the way to God, and her role as muse unfolded within this larger objective. For a few happy years, Phyllis/Phillida/Celia filled her role to perfection. Williams’s ideal woman was never Calliope, but always, sublimely, Beatrice.

  The bliss faded, as it usually does. Phyllis was too young and curious to tie herself to a man in his early forties. She fell in love with Gerard Hopkins, and then with an employee of an oil company, whom she married and accompanied to Java. Williams suffered terribly during this drawn-out separation, but he soon found comfort elsewhere. Other young women fell under his spell; he didn’t love them or sleep with them, but he enjoyed their devotion, confessing to one of them that all his young women students fell in love with him. This bevy of admirers, many of whom popped into OUP at all hours to seek his counsel or just to enjoy his jittery, dazzling company, came to be known to his office mates as “C.W.’s young women.”

  C.W.’s platonic harem was for him, however, but a minor distraction. His love, deflected by Phyllis, now poured into writing. From 1930 to 1936, those years in which he suffered most acutely from her rejection, he published fourteen books, ranging across poetry, anthologies, literary criticism, biographies, and fiction. Poetry at Present (1930) stands out among the critical studies. It examines the work of eighteen contemporary poets with forthrightness and wit (of T. S. Eliot, Williams begins, “In some former existence, among the myths of Greece, Mr. Eliot was probably a gadfly”), and concludes each essay with a poem of Williams’s own composition inspired by the poet he has just been discussing. The English Poetic Mind (1932), a more ambitious but less interesting volume, based on a course he had taught at the London Day Training College in 1931, investigates the poetic genius of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, concluding, à la Barfield, that great poetry not only depicts an experience but also awakens in us a capacity to live that experience: “We are told of a thing; we are made to feel as if that thing were possible to us; and we are so made to feel it … that our knowledge is an intense satisfaction to us.” During this period, Williams also wrote lives of Bacon, James I, Rochester, and Queen Elizabeth. They are uninspired, competent, and no longer read. Eliot, who apparently took no umbrage at being called a gadfly, correctly dismissed some of Williams’s books as potboilers, adding, however, that “he always boiled an honest pot.”

  On a different level entirely are the five novels Williams produced during this fecund span. They deliver that rarest of treats, intelligent Christian fantasy. Almost always, the plots involve the eruption into ordinary reality of a supernatural power or substance. These tales are, then, first cousins to the science fiction romances of H. G. Wells, especially The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, with miraculous events replacing scientifically plausible, if improbable, ones. In War in Heaven (1930), the second of Williams’s novels to be written but the first to be published, the Holy Grail appears in the pokey English village of Fardles; Many Dimensions (1931) replaces the Grail with the Stone of Suleiman, a chunk of primordial matter that confers upon its owner the power of granting wishes, teleportation, and the like. In The Greater Trumps (1932), the fantastic element is a magical Tarot deck; in Shadows of Ecstasy (1933), the weakest of the novels, begun in 1925 and rewritten in 1932, it is a preternaturally long-lived magician who fosters an African uprising against Europe.

  But surely the most intriguing of Williams’s novels, in its ingenuity of conception and the gossamer beauty of its unfolding, is The Place of the Lion (1931), in which the Platonic Forms descend to earth in the guise of enormous animals—lion, butterfly, snake, eagle, phoenix, unicorn, horse—and begin to reabsorb their material counterparts. Thus a huge butterfly, the Form of Beauty, appears in an English garden, “two feet or more across from wing-tip to wing-tip … tinted and coloured with every conceivable brightness … lovely and self-sufficient,” and draws to itself all ordinary butterflies:

  Away across the fields they came, here in thick masses, there in thinner lines, white and yellow, green and red, purple and blue and dusky black … he turned his head, and saw a cloud of them hanging high above the butterfly of the garden, which rushed up towards them, and then, carrying a whirl of lesser iridescent fragilities with it, precipitated itself down its steep descent; and as it swept, and hovered, and again mounted, silent and unresting, it was alone.

  The giant butterfly does not content itself with absorbing its simulacra; it also enchants a human being too obsessed with beauty—“‘O glory, glory,’ Mr. Tighe said, ‘O glory everlasting!’”—who falls into a contemplative trance and then into death. The Forms quicken or destroy a number of people before the central character, Anthony Durrant, who has the intellectual purity and moral power to understand what is happening and how to respond, sends the Forms back to their archetypal world through a magical invocation,

  a sound as of a single word, but not English, nor Latin, nor Greek. Hebrew it might have been or something older than Hebrew, some incantation whereby the prediluvian magicians had controlled contentions among spirits or the language in which our father Adam named the beasts of the garden … He called and he commanded … By the names that were the Ideas he called them, and the Ideas who are the Principles of everlasting creation heard him … They were returning, summoned by the authority of man from their incursion into the world of man.

  Anthony’s invocation reached as far as the halls of Magdalen College, and there, too, its summons was heard. Nevill Coghill had urged Lewis to read The Place of the Lion, and on February 26, 1936, Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves, “I have just read what I think a really great book … It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility. In fact it has been a big experience.”

  On March 11, Lewis wrote to Williams out of the blue, declaring “I never know about writing to an author … But I feel I must risk it,” and went on to say that The Place of the Lion was “one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris.” He then took a bold and fateful step: he described to Williams the Inklings, an “informal club … the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity,” and invited him to attend a meeting. Williams responded instantly, praising The Allegory of Love, which he had been reading in proofs for Amen House, and declaring it the first book since Dante to fathom the relation between love and religion: “If you had delayed writing another 24 hours, our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me.”

  Mutual admiration had rarely commenced at such a high pitch; the Inklings would never be the same.

  11

  SECONDARY WORLDS

  While Lewis and Williams swapped compliments, Tolkien enjoyed his own share of praise and laurels. The British Library Association nominated The Hobbit for the Carnegie Medal for 1937, and in 1938 it won the Children’s Spring Book Festival prize from the New York Herald Tribune. Friends and strangers continued to congratulate him and say how much they enjoyed the book. The accolade that most thrilled him, however, came from the children’s writer Arthur Ransome, adored by all the Tolkien offspring for his Swallows and Amazons tales (Pigeon Post, sixth in the series, had won the first Carnegie Medal). Ransome, in a nursing home after an operation for umbilical hernia, wrote to Tolkien on December 13, 1937, describing himself as “a humble hobbit-fancier.” He also ventured a small criticism, suggesting that Gandalf had misused the word “man” when speaking of Bilbo (who is, of course, a hobbit). Tolkien responded
immediately, expressing his pleasure at the letter, welcoming the correction—“man” became “fellow” in the second edition—and asking after Ransome’s health. In reply, Ransome piled on the praise, assuring Tolkien that his book “has done a great deal to turn these weeks [of convalescence] into a pleasure,” lauding his “delicate skill,” and assuring him that his book would see “dozens” of editions. Such honeyed words from a famous author meant much to Tolkien, who lacked Lewis’s red-cheeked self-confidence and would have seconded Conrad’s celebrated (but possibly apocryphal) cry, “I don’t want criticism, I want praise!”

  “Man, Sub-Creator”

  Despite Ransome’s encouragement and that of others, however, Tolkien had difficulty moving on to another full-length tale. Instead, he refined his Elvish languages and worked on a novella, Farmer Giles of Ham, that had seen first light as a bedtime story for his kids; it would remain unpublished until 1949. One day in 1936 or 1937, Lewis said to him, “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” The two agreed on the spot that each would produce an “excursionary ‘Thriller,’” Lewis taking on space travel—resulting in the 1937 novel Out of the Silent Planet—while Tolkien tried his hand at time travel. He set about writing The Lost Road, the tale of a family that time-slips through dreams, an adventure culminating in the inundation of the great island of Númenor. For many years now, as noted in chapter 3, Tolkien had suffered from nightmares of a great, deadly wave; perhaps The Lost Road would destroy the power of this terrifying oneiric image by transforming it into art. But the tale never gelled; the exasperated reader at Allen & Unwin, to whom he sent it as a possible sequel to The Hobbit, declared it “a hopeless proposition.”