The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  And so it was. He bestowed upon her a new name, that of Lalage, the slave girl. He gave her new, virtuous tasks—to pray for friends, to excel in charity. He believed in her potential, both spiritual and poetic, and read to the Inklings her essay on Milton, while carefully omitting those phrases in her text that hinted at his strange relationship with her. But how should he nurture her potential? He ordered her to stand in corners and to bind her own ankles with string. In February 1944, Lang-Sims took the train up from London “in a painfully divided state,” still swept off her feet yet confused by Williams’s behavior, aware that he “had manoeuvered me into a position where I could not refuse him anything without seeming to refuse him everything.” He met her bewildered innocence with another punishment, best told in her own words: “After I had kissed his hand, kneeling on one knee, and he had kissed mine, he told me to bend over a chair and lift up my skirt. When I did so, he took the ruler and struck me hard on the behind.”

  Lang-Sims returned home “in a state of dangerous exhaustion,” and retreated to her bed. She remained there for six weeks. Unable to escape her role as Lalage, she wrote to Williams, declaring that her “punishment had been inadequate.” He replied that the thin walls of his room had restrained his hand and that next time “I will play my part with more rigour.” But there would be no next time. Lang-Sims had had enough. She confronted Williams in May, accusing him of reducing her to a figure in a myth. He agreed instantly, handed her—as a memento or a bit of spite—his wife’s obscure little volume, Christian Symbolism, and dismissed her with a “Go with God.” Master and acolyte corresponded fitfully and met for lunch a year later, but “nothing was as it had been before.”

  What led Williams to indulge in ritualized sadistic behavior with a much younger woman unable to determine, much less express, her own wishes in the matter? Lang-Sims, who later authored several books (including The Christian Mystery: An Exposition of Esoteric Christianity), believed that Williams was practicing a form of sexual magic to accumulate power. Circumstantial evidence supports her theory. He was, of course, an expert in ritual occultism, experiencing it firsthand as a member of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross and employing it as a plot device in his novels. In an unpublished 1940 letter to Phyllis, he discusses the sexual energy generated by contemplation of her arms and links it to imagination and intellect. Lang-Sims found parallels to Williams’s presumed thought and practice in Tantrism; both offered, she believed, access to “power through sexual transcendence” based upon the interplay of arousal and restraint. A more mundane explanation presents itself, however: that Williams harbored impulses, largely kept under control—he was, after all, a benevolent and generous man—that erupted in the intense stress of the war years, a sexual analogue to his twitching limbs and incoherent letters. There are indications that Lang-Sims may not have been his only victim. Sadism was long a component of his imagination; as early as 1930, he had written to Phyllis that “I am sadistic towards you, but within the sadism is mastery, and within the mastery is government, within the government is instruction, within the instruction, service…” and, in a later letter, “I wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it made it perfectly clear that it liked it. And then only a little. And then only for the conversation.”

  All this is painful to read, difficult to assimilate. Only the hopelessly naïve believe that someone who writes beautifully about Christianity (or any religion) is incapable of such behavior; yet invariably it shocks to discover such extreme disconnection between public pronouncement and private life. The revelations of Lang-Sims and others dismayed, when they did not devastate, Williams’s admirers. Some felt betrayed, some turned upon the messenger, some said that the disclosures came as no surprise, for everyone is a sinner. Williams, who believed in original sin, would have agreed.

  His behavior and his antic letters suggest a mind cracking under immense psychic pressures: not only those occasioned by loneliness, thwarted ambition, and repressed sexuality, but those triggered by his need always and everywhere to keep secret his private life. They show, too, that he was a master of disguise. In The Listener of December 1946, T. S. Eliot proclaimed him “a man of unusual genius” and possessor of “an extended spiritual sense”; ten years later, W. H. Auden wrote that “in his [Williams’s] company one felt twice as intelligent and infinitely nicer than, out of it, one knew oneself to be.” All this is true. But what does one make of Eliot’s declaration, in his 1948 introduction to All Hallows’ Eve, that “I have never known a healthier-minded man than Williams” and that he was “a gay and simple man,” or of Auden’s observation, after meeting with Williams, that “for the first time in my life [I] felt myself in the presence of personal sanctity,” or of Lewis’s claim that Williams “was extremely attractive to young women and (what is rare) none of his male friends ever wondered why: nor did it ever do a young woman anything but immense good to be attracted by Charles Williams”?

  The truth is, Williams was not simple and happy but complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted. Lewis came closer to the truth when he described Williams as double-sided, by which he meant that he was a pessimist in feelings, an optimist in faith. The full truth is that Williams was multisided, presenting himself, as it suited him or as his obsessions demanded, in one role or guise or mythological mode after another. Lewis also came close to the mark when he noted that a friend of Williams, whom Lewis does not identify, “always found Williams a reserved man, one in whom, after years of friendship, there remained something elusive and incalculable.” Just so. He was to students a mesmerizing classroom performer; to magicians a master magus; to young women a sage, a disciplinarian, a platonic lover; to men of his own age an artist, a thinker, a poet; to all, at one time or another, an inspiration. It may be that no one—not his wife, not even he himself—knew him as he really was. “I am certain as one can be of anything,” said Lang-Sims, “that no one ever really penetrated beneath the mask-like image that Charles presented of himself.”

  Culture in War Time

  The Kilns had never been so alive. In addition to Lewis, Warnie, and Mrs. Moore (Maureen had married and departed in 1940), animals galore roamed the property, including two swans (a gift from the president of Magdalen), a dog (the beloved Papworth, who died in 1936 and was replaced by the frequently barking, sometimes incontinent, much despised Bruce), cats, and countless chickens, badgers, foxes, rabbits, birds, snakes, and frogs. Tending these animals was Fred Paxford, caretaker and gardener, who lived in a bungalow on the property. Paxford was a wizard with fruits, vegetables, and chickens, and skilled enough at feeding swans, mending roofs, and burying dead pets, but he was surrounded by a nimbus of gloom, usually expressed in prophecies of impending disaster (later he served as the model for the aptly named Puddleglum in The Chronicles of Narnia). A typical Paxfordism, explaining why the Kilns lacked sugar on the table, runs as follows: “Well, you never know when the end of the world will come and we don’t want to be left with sugar on our hands. What’ll we do with it then, eh?” Warnie disliked him intensely, in part because Mrs. Moore quoted him as an authority on every subject and took to taunting Warnie by calling him Pax-Warnie; he struck back in the safety of his diary with an anemic “Bugger Paxford.” The gardener, for his part, had kind words for everyone at the Kilns, notably Mrs. Moore, whom he described as “like a mother to Mr. Jack … She was also very good to me … She bottled a lot of fruit and gave a lot of it away. She gave a lot of eggs away as well. She had a kind nature. Anyone who came to the Kilns for help nearly always went away with money, and if it was a man, a handful of cigarettes.”

  The primary source of congestion in this eccentric Noah’s Ark was the influx of refugees fleeing London and other big cities. On September 2, 1939, a group of four young girls had arrived at the Kilns. Lewis wrote immediately to Warnie, who had been summoned to active duty and posted to North Yorkshire, that “our schoolgirls have arrived and all seem
to me—and, what’s more important, to Minto—to be very nice, unaffected creatures and all most flatteringly delighted with their new surroundings.” The girls—only girls, a restriction set by Mrs. Moore and the Lewis brothers—came in waves throughout the war. They adored Mrs. Moore, her evident devotion to Lewis, her funny habit of dangling a cigarette from the corner of her mouth. Patricia Boshell, an evacuee who lived at the Kilns in 1940, recalled her as “kind, solicitous, and indeed, most forbearing.” Boshell and the other evacuees loved Lewis, too, who greeted them warmly and helped them with their homework. Lewis tutored Boshell in Latin and Greek and arranged to pay her tuition at Oxford University on the condition that the gift remain a secret.

  Another evacuee, June Flewett, who arrived in 1943—she would later marry Clement Freud, a member of Parliament and grandson of Sigmund Freud—greatly admired both brothers. Warnie she found “comfy to be with all the time and obviously highly intelligent” and devoted to music: “Almost every Sunday night the brothers listened to a complete symphony on Major Lewis’s old gramophone. It had a large, wooden, handmade horn. The sound was good and he was proud of it; no one else was allowed to use it.” Lewis’s great gift to her, not surprisingly, was books: “what Jack Lewis imposed—I should say unwittingly and continually impressed on me—were ideas and books … he told me to go to Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford, anytime, and buy any book I wanted on his account … Lewis was the first person who made me believe that I was an intelligent human being and the whole of the time I was there he built up my confidence in myself and in my ability to think and understand.” Flewett’s admiration for her hosts was warmly reciprocated; when she prepared to quit the Kilns in 1945 to train as an actress in London, Warnie wrote in his diary that “our dear, delightful June Flewett leaves us tomorrow, after nearly two years … She is not yet eighteen, but I have met no one of any age further advanced in the Christian way of life. From seven in the morning till nine at night … she has slaved at The Kilns, for a fraction 2d an hour; I have never seen her other than gay, eager to anticipate exigent demands, never complaining, always self accusing in the frequent crises of that dreary house.” Lewis gave her a book inscribed with the following note:

  Beauty and brains and virtue never dwell

  Together in one place, the critics say.

  Yet we have known a case

  You must not ask her name

  But seek it ’twixt July and May.

  Lewis not only enjoyed Flewett and the other evacuees; he drew literary inspiration from them, eventually using them as models for the young protagonists in The Chronicles of Narnia. But he was unable, when at home, to spend as much time with them as he might have wished. Shortly after Great Britain declared war on the Third Reich, austerity measures swept the nation, and the university suspended all lectureships; his annual income plummeted and he took on the dreaded task of grading School Certificates to compensate for the loss, complaining of the new work to Warnie, now serving at a base supply depot in Le Havre, France. As the war ground on, the niggling tasks multiplied. Lewis made sure that the Kilns met blackout requirements, by means of a “most complicated Arthur Rackham system of odd rags—quite effectively but at the cost of much labour. Luckily I do most of the rooms myself, so it doesn’t take me nearly so long as if I were assisted.” He tried not to grumble about rationing—in early 1940, butter, sugar, and pork products had become controlled foods, followed soon by other beloved British staples, including tea, cheese, and jam. This led to obsessive hoarding on Mrs. Moore’s part, but Lewis fought off panic, writing to Arthur that “I think a great deal of nonsense is talked about rationing. I’ve never been hungry yet—in fact the only way it affects me is to plunge me back into the pleasures of early boyhood.”

  He did, however, brood over Warnie’s safety. Afraid that prayers might amount to doubting God’s providence, he scribbled in his notebook, “How can I ask thee Father to defend / In peril of war my brother’s head to-day.” But pray he did, answering his question with additional lines suggesting that prayer is a way to share God’s “eternal will.” Out of kindness and blood duty and to relieve his own anxiety, he sent Warnie long frequent letters packed with gossip, news, memories, and literary asides. Lewis hated the filial separation, hated the terror and deprivation of armed conflict. Before the war, he had confessed to Griffiths that “if its got to be, its got to be. But the flesh is weak and selfish and I think death wd. be much better than to live through another war.” He felt, as Warnie did, a “ghostly feeling that it has all happened before—that one fell asleep during the last war and had a delightful dream and has now waked up again,” and wished he could hibernate through the whole affair or wake up from the dream and find himself “safely dead and not quite damned.” But once plunged into the wartime ethos, in many ways he found it to be a profound stimulant, as he wrote Arthur: “for me, personally, [the war] has come in the nick of time: I was just beginning to get too well settled in my profession, too successful, and probably self complacent.”

  As a nearly forty-one-year-old don, responsible for teaching younger undergraduates exempt from service, Lewis had every reason to hope that he would be spared the horrors of battle. A troubling dilemma remained, one faced by all students and teachers at Oxford who stayed behind while others went to die on their behalf, and by the university itself, which might be obliged at any moment to suspend regular operations: How could one justify the intellectual life in time of war? This quandary furnished the subject for Lewis’s first sermon, “None Other Gods: Culture in War Time” (later published as “Christians in Danger,” then as “Learning in War-Time”), preached at St. Mary the Virgin on October 22, 1939. With a world war once more threatening to derail the education and possibly cost the lives of the undergraduates in the pews, Lewis voiced the inevitable question: “What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing?… why should we—indeed how can we—continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?”

  The answer, for Lewis, has to do with the nature of Christian vocation. A Christian may be called to heroic exertion and sacrifice or to more humble tasks. The main thing is to stay at one’s post. If the life of a scholar is good in ordinary times, Lewis maintains, it remains good during war; if it is a frivolity during war, it has no place in a world at peace. “If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth … we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.”

  Meanwhile, there were other ways to serve. There were schoolgirls to tend to and anxieties to calm, with Mrs. Moore expecting a German invasion of the Kilns any day and bomb alerts becoming a matter of routine. There were honorable civilian roles; in the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, Lewis joined the recently formed Local Defence Volunteers (later called the Home Guard), which meant spending “one night in nine mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford with a rifle.” The real war work for Lewis, however, would be defense of the faith and, nearly as important, defense of the integrity of literary experience. England was under siege from without, but Christianity and Western culture were under siege from within, and that was a battle—a war of attrition for the most part—that Lewis was prepared to fight with every weapon at his disposal. As he put it to Warnie, “I can never forget Tolkien’s Spanish friend who, after having several colleges pointed out to him by name from the roof of the Radder [the Radcliffe Camera], observed with surprise ‘So this was once a Christian country?’”

  “I Am a Very Ordinary Layman…”

  Lewis had been a Christian for twelve years now, with all the expected peaks and troughs; the war gave
him fresh motive for diligence in observing the sacraments and other ordinances of the faith. In October, after much trepidation, he resolved to make his first confession, the Anglican principle being that “none must, all may, some should” confess privately to a priest. This “auricular” confession was a significant step beyond the General Confession that is a regular part of the liturgy, and Lewis worried that it might make him morbidly self-concerned. Fortunately, he found an able and holy confessor in Fr. Walter Adams of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (the “Cowley Fathers”), the Anglican Benedictine community founded in 1865 by Richard Meux Benson as part of the Anglo-Catholic revival.