‘Our spirits revived until we heard at midday on the Friday that Hitler had invaded Poland. We knew then that war was imminent. The news broke on us, I think, at Godstow, and the return to Oxford was in an unnatural silence. We left Bosphorus at Salter’s, and agreed to meet for a final dinner at the Clarendon in Cornmarket. At dinner Lewis tried to lighten the gloom by saying, “Well, at any rate we now have less chance of dying of cancer.”’
*
War was declared the following Sunday. Lewis had been told that his college rooms, together with the whole of New Buildings, would be required for government use. Gloomily he and Warnie had moved all their books into the basement. A week after the war began it was announced that the building was not needed after all. Laboriously, he brought all the books back again. Indeed it soon appeared that the hostilities were unlikely to cause so very great a disruption in the life of the University – at least, the colleges would not be closing down to anything like the extent they had done in the First World War. Besides the undergraduates (comparatively few in number) who continued with their normal studies, there began some time later to be a steady flow of cadets who were sent to Oxford to spend a few terms reading ‘shortened courses’ before going off to active service. While some dons who, like Lewis, were above the age for military service were required to take on government jobs of various kinds, many remained to continue working much as they had done in peacetime. Lewis soon found that he and Tolkien and most of his Oxford friends were in the latter category. Meanwhile evacuee children were billeted at the Kilns, and, when on 17 September news came that Russian forces had crossed into Poland, Lewis reported that Mrs Moore ‘regards this as sealing the fate of the allies – and even talks of buying a revolver’.
But, as he wrote to Warnie, ‘along with these not very pleasant indirect results of the war, there is one pure gift – the London branch of the Oxford University Press has moved to Oxford, so that Charles Williams is living here.’
PART TWO
1
C.W.
“The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.’
It was a conventional beginning to what at first sight appeared to be a conventional detective story. An unidentified man is murdered in the offices of a publishing company. There are a number of suspects. Inspector Colquhoun investigates.
But, when the book was published in 1930, readers soon discovered that it was not exactly like that. The corpse, it appeared, was only the introduction to the real story: the discovery of the Holy Grail in a country church, its theft by a black magic enthusiast, and the attempt of an Anglican parson and a Roman Catholic Duke to rescue it. Nor did even this seem to be entirely what the story was about, for the pursuit of the Grail (or ‘Graal’ as the author spelt it) was soon giving place to visionary experiences and the contention of the forces of good and evil. As Inspector Colquhoun remarked in Chapter Sixteen, ‘What an infernally religious case this is getting!’
The book was called War in Heaven, and it was the first novel to be published by Charles Williams.
*
By that time – 1930 – the name ‘Mr Charles Williams’ was a familiar sight on the list of evening classes arranged by the London County Council at the City Literary Institute and at Evening Institutes in many parts of the metropolis. Here, in bare buildings with naked light-bulbs, people of all ages and types and levels of education would come for a couple of hours each week, to sit in echoing lecture rooms and study the subject of their choice. Those who opted for English Literature would soon find themselves being lectured to by a thin man with round spectacles, a high forehead, and a long upper lip. He talked in a lower middle-class London accent, and the vowels of his speech seemed at first to contrast oddly with his manner, which was quite unlike that of any other Evening Institute lecturer. Sitting on a table and often moving his arms and hands in dramatic gestures, he spoke passionately and without ceasing. Most people gave up trying to take notes.
His lectures were usually on major poets, especially Milton, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, though sometimes he talked about modem poetry or even (though the classes were supposed to be in English Literature) on Dante. People who came hoping for plain information were taken aback, for, though he chose his words with great precision, he mentioned few facts. Nor did he offer the usual sort of critical opinions. Indeed he did not really discuss the poetry at all. What he did was to communicate his feelings for it, or even his ability to participate in it. His lectures were full of quotations, always done from memory and never from notes or a text; or rather, they were not so much quotations as incantations, a kind of ritual chanting of lines from the poem he was talking about – or very likely from a totally different poem, for he might use a phrase from Milton to illustrate an ode of Keats, or a line of Wordsworth to comment on something in Dante. He seemed in fact to be able to express his own thoughts best by taking phrases from the great poets, seemed to think largely in poetry, so it was no surprise to learn from a casual remark he might drop in a lecture that he wrote poetry himself – though very few people had ever read any of it.
After the hour’s lecture there would be (by the rules of the Evening Institutes) an hour’s discussion, not the usual stilted question-and-answers which happen in those circumstances but – such was the enthusiasm with which he would pick up a hesitant remark from a member of his audience – a vital and involved conversation. And when the formal discussion was over there would always be somebody stopping to talk to him afterwards, maybe on the subject of poetry but more likely about some highly private problem of their own; for regular attenders at his classes had long ago discovered the very special kind of help he could give. He would treat someone’s personal worry with the same vitality that he showed in the lecture, the same grave courtesy and fiery vision; so that it was easy to go home feeling that this was what it would have been like to meet Dante himself, or Blake, or even Shakespeare.
This too was the feeling he created at his place of work, which was in a small semi-private square lying under the shadow of the Old Bailey, hard by St Paul’s Cathedral at the heart of the City of London. Here each weekday morning there would arrive, one by one, the staff of the London office of the Oxford University Press, which had its premises in Amen House. Promptness was a rule of the house, and the junior members of the firm would be in their places by the time the City clocks struck nine. In one of the smaller rooms, with a window looking out to the dome of the Old Bailey, a clerk would change the calendar and the date stamp which lay on the desk, ready for the occupant. Then, at 9.15 precisely, feet would run up the stairs and a figure would spring into the room. Hat, gloves and walking-stick would be hung up, and their owner would throw himself into his chair, swivelling and tilting it back so that he could put his feet on the desk. In this fashion, with a sixpenny writing pad balanced on his knee, he would finish the poem he had been thinking about while walking up Newgate Street from the Underground station; and all the time he would be talking to the clerk or to the man who shared the office with him, or to somebody who came in from another department. Soon, he would leave his own writing on one side and get down to the firm’s work, perhaps reading a manuscript submitted by an author, or casting his eye over proofs, or discussing details of binding and typeface with the people who looked after the production of books. But even then he was often turning back to his own occupations, dashing off a letter to a friend in rather shaky handwriting (his hands trembled due to some slight nervous affliction), finishing a review for Time & Tide, and at lunch time rushing out for an appointment with another friend over a sandwich at Shirreff’s Wine Vaults in Ludgate Hill. The only thing that could break the independence of his routine would be a summons to the inner sanctum where sat the Publisher himself, Sir Humphrey Milford; for when word came that ‘Sir Humphrey wishes to see Mr Williams’ there was never any delay or excuse, but an immediate journey down corridors to the big room with its ornate ceiling and
heavy carved chairs. Here, and here only, Charles Williams ceased to be the poet, the critic, the visionary, and became a publisher’s assistant who had been with the firm for a quarter of a century and would presumably remain with it to the end of his working days.
But soon he would be out of the Publisher’s room, lighting a cigarette and bounding up the stairs two at a time to his own office; and then somebody would meet him on the staircase and would say something to him – perhaps just a casual greeting or remark – and he would immediately turn his full attention to that person, and they would embark on a conversation that might be hilarious but would also be deeply serious. So the day would pass, and soon he would be hurrying off to take an evening class. Not until a late hour would he return by Tube to Hampstead, where in a rented flat at the top of a dizzy staircase, with tall windows that looked out towards the lights of the West End and the City in the distance, he would drink a cup of tea and talk to his wife, say goodnight to his small son, and then settle down, with the pad balanced on his knee, to more writing. It might be the next chapter of a historical biography that had been commissioned by a publisher, or a book review, or the beginning of another novel, whose royalties he hoped would help to pay next year’s bills. Or just possibly, if he was feeling self-indulgent, he might allow himself to spend an hour or two writing the only thing he really cared about: poetry. He would try not to stay up very late, but very likely he would not be able to sleep properly; and if that was the case (it happened quite often) he would be at work again as dawn came up over London.
*
His full name was Charles Walter Stansby Williams, and he was a Londoner born and bred, brought up not a Cockney (as some of his Oxford admirers later alleged) but at Holloway in the northern part of the city, an area characterised by railway goods yards, small shops and businesses, and endless terraces of drab brick houses.
He was born in 1886, the elder of two children, and for the first eight years of his life there was something like security. His father, a man of some education, worked as a clerk in the City but devoted much of his spare time to literature, reading widely and contributing poems and short stories to magazines, from which he made a few guineas. He and his wife were devout members of the Church of England; in his early years Charles caught their fervour and was always happy in church, where he chanted the psalms loudly in a most unmusical voice.
In 1894 there was a double crisis in the family. Mr Williams’s firm was about to close, so he would lose his job, and at the same time he was warned by a doctor that his eyesight, never good and now fast deteriorating, would be irretrievably damaged if he did not move out of London to fresher air.
Somehow the family weathered the storm. The notion of living in ‘the country’ did not appeal in the least, for they were town dwellers by habit and inclination, so they compromised by moving to the city of St Albans, where they found a vacant shop which they decided to run as a business selling artist’s materials. In the years that followed, this managed to produce an adequate if unreliable income, though the worries about money made a mark on Charles, who in adult life was never able to avoid worrying about his own finances.
The father’s sight did not improve, and, though he never became totally blind, Mr Williams was soon unable to give much help with the shop or to continue with his literary hobbies. The frustration and misery of this was communicated to his son, so that for the rest of his life Charles Williams was largely pessimistic, and never indulged in shallow optimism. But it did mean that the father had much time to devote to the son, and the two went for long walks together in St Albans and the Hertfordshire countryside around, talking all the time. Outside the town they paid little attention to their surroundings, for neither of them could see well – Charles was very short-sighted – and in any case they were more interested in talk than scenery. Mr Williams was not only widely-read but totally undogmatic, teaching his son that there were many sides to every argument, and that it was necessary to understand the elements of reason in the other point of view as well as your own. Though a devout churchman, he encouraged Charles to appreciate the force of atheist rationalism and to admire such men as Voltaire and Tom Paine. Above all he insisted on accuracy, impressing on his son that one should never defend one’s opinions by exaggeration or distortion of the facts. It was a remarkable education. It did not – which it perhaps might have done – encourage Charles to adopt an attitude of detachment. He learnt to be committed, in his case to Christianity; but he also learnt that the other side may have an equal force of argument. It was perhaps partly because of this that he never wavered from belief in God during his adolescence; or, to put it another way, his father had taught him to absorb doubt and disbelief into his beliefs.
His formal education was at day schools in St Albans, but his father was his real educational influence. Already Charles was developing a remarkably nimble and active mind. One of the St Albans Abbey clergy who prepared him for confirmation remarked that the boy ‘had too many brains for him’, and that he could not get to the bottom of what was going on in Charles’s head.
In adolescence Charles began to write poetry, and such was his trust in his father that he showed it to him, and received both encouragement and constructive criticism. Indeed, at this stage of his life he shared his serious ideas with no one but his father. The only school friend that he asked to read his poetry found much of it beyond him. However, with this school friend’s help Charles did regularly enact a private fantasy, a kind of continuing Ruritania-style drama which the boys performed at odd moments of the day, and in which Charles’s sister Edith was enlisted to play the Princess. From this, Charles learnt the delight of living in a world of half-serious, half-comic assumed identities. These Ruritanian inventions also appealed to his growing love of ritual and ceremony, as did the historical pageants which were regularly performed at his school in St Albans. Indeed the school itself, which was in an old monastic building close to the Abbey, delighted him with its spiral staircases, vaulted roofs, tall dark classrooms, and the view of the Abbey itself, from which the bells rang out the quarters.
In 1901 Charles won an Intermediate Scholarship to University College, London, and began to study there before his sixteenth birthday, reading a general course which included Latin, French, and English history, but which did not offer any specialised training. He continued to live at home in St Albans, travelling by train into London each day, so that college life made comparatively little impression on him and seemed to be no more than an extension of school. Moreover after two years his family found that they could no longer afford to contribute to the cost of keeping him at the university, so he left without taking a degree, and at the age of eighteen he set about earning his living.
A clerk’s post was found for him – for he was scarcely qualified for anything better – at a Methodist Bookroom in the Holborn district of London, and he began work there in 1904. He endured the menial work with patience and even with humour, and he might have continued there indefinitely had not the Bookroom closed in 1908, so that it was necessary for him to find another job. A friend, Frederick Page, told him that there was a post as a proof reader in the London office of the Oxford University Press. He applied, was accepted, and began there, still travelling to London daily from St Albans.
After the Methodist Bookroom the Press was majestic. Within its walls Charles Williams found stability, hierarchy, and order. The London office was largely independent of the University Press in Oxford, but it had much of the formality and academic grandeur of its Oxford parent. It has been described as ‘rather like an ancient half-occupied half-ruined palace, where a number of people maintained a living ritual and ceremonial duties, and in whose vaulted roofs sounded the chant of Greek and Latin verse and the echo of venerated names’.
As the offices of the Press were in the City of London, Williams found the surroundings peculiarly appealing. Just as at St Albans he had been impressed by the sense of history and ritual conveyed by the Abbey
and by the medieval buildings of his school, so he now found this expressed even more positively by the City. Or, rather, it was not so much the notion of history that the City conveyed to him as the idea of the perfect formal community.
Many other young men, chained like him to an office desk and a repetitive job, would not have shared his vision. But to Charles Williams the City, with its churches, its law-courts, its business houses, banks, libraries and printing presses, seemed the expression of an ideal order. The City’s rigid hierarchies and rules, as well as its love of pageantry and ritual, delighted his imagination and seemed to him refreshingly stable and unshakeable after the uncertainties and worries of his parents’ home. Indeed to him the City of London soon became an earthly expression of the ultimate city, the City of God.
At this time he began to find companions with whom he could share his poetry and his ideas. He made friends through a Working Men’s College in London where he attended part-time classes, and with these, as well as with his old school friend in St Albans, he spent many hours in amiably contentious arguments, sometimes changing his own position half-way through a debate just to find out what sort of case he could put for the other side (a legacy of his father’s training). From such evenings of talk came warm affection, recalled by him in a poem:
O rooms and roads of gay contest,
Journey and argument and jest,
From Kew to Harpenden!
Where, while the days made man of me,
The Inklings Page 10
