The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  My love felt yours amazedly –

  Men splendid among men.

  Not all Charles Williams’s friendships were with other men. In 1908 he met Florence Conway, the daughter of a St Albans ironmonger and a helper at the Sunday School where he was teaching. ‘For the first five minutes of our meeting’, she recalled, ‘I thought him the most silent, withdrawn young man I had ever met. For the rest of the evening I thought him the most talkative young man I had ever met, and still the nicest.’ They became engaged to be married.

  Florence did not pretend to be learned, nor did she share Charles’s passionate intellectual interests. But she was shrewd and intelligent, and lively too, though she was sometimes embarrassed by her fiancé’s exuberance, particularly his tendency to recite poetry loudly in public places; and she rebuked him for this. He in reply nicknamed her ‘Michal’, after Saul’s daughter who mocked at David when he danced before the Lord. And ‘Michal’ she remained.

  As for his feelings towards her, he declared that hers was ‘a face which some pre-Raphaelite should have loved’; and there was a good deal of the pre-Raphaelite about the sequence of eighty-four sonnets that he wrote for her and thrust into her hands one night. She read them carefully. ‘So lovely they seemed,’ she said. But she also noted – and it puzzled her – that, though they were addressed to her, their theme was the renunciation of love.

  Why should he have considered renouncing love? In part it was simply his awareness that marriage with its many obligations and strains might destroy love: he was never easily optimistic. But, more than this, he was discontented about the very ordinariness of ‘being in love’. His mind was too subtle and self-aware, too capable of seeing endless possibilities in every human thought and action, for the state of loving to seem enough. He asked himself ‘whether love were not meant for something more than wantonness and child-bearing and the future that closes in death’. He meditated on the notion of achieving some spiritual advancement through renunciation, speculating in the sonnets he wrote for ‘Michal’ whether they might not ‘put off love for love’s sake’. And there was another possibility. Turning to his Christian beliefs, he considered the idea that love for another human being might be a step towards God – ‘the steep’, as he expressed it in the sonnet sequence, ‘whence I see God’. At this point he discovered Dante.

  In 1910 the Oxford University Press reissued Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy. It was Charles Williams’s task to correct the proofs. In this fashion he came to read Dante’s account of how his love for Beatrice eventually brings him through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise and the Beatific Vision of the Trinity. Williams did not respond, as many commentators and critics had done, by speculating on what this could mean. He simply felt: ‘But this is true.’ It was exactly what he had been aiming towards in his own thoughts: the notion that human love can lead to a selfless love of the divine. In Dante he found confirmation of his hope that love for his own ‘Michal’ might not just be an end in itself but indeed the approach to spiritual ecstasy. And, having in mind this notion of earthly love being a ladder or staircase up to God, he called the sonnet sequence The Silver Stair.

  Thanks to encouragement and financial help from the poet Alice Meynell and her husband Wilfrid, who happened to be friends of Williams’s colleague at the Press, Fred Page, The Silver Stair was published in 1912. But it was not until 1917, when he was thirty and they had been betrothed for nine years, that he married Michal. It is difficult to say quite why they delayed so long. There may have been practical reasons such as concern over money or future prospects. Or perhaps it had something to do with a fundamental element in Charles Williams’s character, the thing that he was trying to express when he told a friend: ‘At bottom a darkness has always haunted me.’

  *

  What was this darkness? In part it was no more than a sense of potential chaos and despair. But it also, perhaps, had a connection with his habit from early years of changing sides in an argument. Behind every bad thing he could see something good, but also behind every good thing he could see darkness. Nor did he stop at the mere intellectual contemplation of it. There were reverse sides to two of the principal areas of his life. He was a devout member of the Church of England, but he was also interested in magic. He was a devoted lover, but he also enjoyed the notion of inflicting pain.

  Probably he took at least a mild interest in magic during his childhood; certainly by the time he was in his late twenties he was making some study of the beliefs and practices of that semi-magical branch of Christianity known as Rosicrucianism. During this period he read books by the Rosicrucian writer A. E. Waite; he entered into correspondence with Waite, and at Waite’s invitation was initiated (in 1917) into an organisation called the Order of the Golden Dawn.1

  The line between religion and magic is sometimes hard to draw, and since its foundation thirty years earlier this Order had wavered rather uncertainly between the two. In its early days some of its members had certainly indulged in would-be magical practices. Among its first initiates was a coroner who allegedly performed necromantic rites over corpses obtained through his profession, while another early member was the black magician Aleister Crowley, the self styled Great Beast who (as Cyril Connolly once said) ‘bridged the gap between Oscar Wilde and Hitler’. But the Order of the Golden Dawn also included persons of less outlandish ways, such as W. B. Yeats, whom Williams met during the period of his membership, one or two clergy with a taste for the mystical, and A. E. Waite himself, who though he was learned in the history of magic did not, it seems, practise it or encourage others to do so – Aleister Crowley called Waite ‘a dull and inaccurate pedant without imagination or real magical perception’. There were many quarrels among the members of the Golden Dawn, and after a series of schisms Waite formed his own ‘temple’. It was this group that Williams joined.

  As a neophyte aspiring to be initiated into the Golden Dawn he would apparently have had to declare: ‘My soul is wandering in the Darkness, seeking for the Light of Occult Knowledge, and I believe that in this Order the Knowledge of that Light may be obtained.’ He also had to take an oath to keep the rites secret, on penalty of a ‘hostile current’ which would be set against him if he broke faith. The oath was kept, and neither Williams nor any other member ever divulged precisely what those rites were. Probably they were harmless enough, based as they seem to have been on Waite’s enthusiasms for freemasonry, vaguely Christian mysticism, and Rosicrucianism, a system of occult beliefs which combines the symbolism of Christianity with the terminology of alchemy, and has the Rosy Cross as its central feature.2 Certainly membership of the Golden Dawn involved the performance of rituals, which Williams, with his love of rite and ceremony, entered into wholeheartedly: he told his friend Anne Ridler that he had always taken care to learn by heart the words of any Golden Dawn rite, so that he could participate with dignity, whereas many other members did not trouble to do so, and merely read the words from a card.

  There does not seem to have been anything in Waite’s ‘temple’ of the Golden Dawn which was opposed to Christianity. Indeed Waite, who had been brought up a Catholic, believed its practices to be part of what he called the ‘Secret Tradition’ of Christianity, the tradition that besides the overt meaning of Christian doctrine there is also a hidden series of truths revealed only to an elect few. Waite remarked of this gnostic tradition, and apparently of his ‘temple’, to which he here seems to be referring: ‘It is not in competition with the external Christian Churches, and yet it is a Church of the Elect, a Hidden and Holy Assembly.’ Its beliefs apparently involved, as a principal symbol, the ‘Holy Graal’ (as Waite spells it). Waite wrote, in a typically incomprehensible sentence: ‘It is a House of the Holy Graal in the sanctity of a High Symbolism, where the sacred intent of the Order is sealed upon Bread and Wine.’

  It was perhaps in Waite’s writings that Williams first found mention of the ‘Tetragrammaton’, the Hebrew name of God which when used in ceremonies, espec
ially in its reversed form, was supposed to have magical powers. Waite also made a special study of talismans and of the Tarot cards, particularly the ‘Trumps Major’, and the ‘Graal’ was a central symbol of his thought. These and other details of occult knowledge were to play a major part in Williams’s novels. In one of Waite’s books he also encountered the ‘Sacred Tree of the Sephiroth’, a symbolic diagram based on the Jewish mystical Zohar, in which various parts of the human body are associated with particular qualities of spirit and mind; Williams later made great use of this in his poetry. Perhaps, too, Williams’s developing notions of human love as a ladder to God owed something to Waite’s account of the concept of marriage in the Zohar, which pictures the nuptial union on earth as a type of, and path of approach to, the mystical union in heaven. And it was maybe also from Waite’s writings that Williams acquired some of his knowledge of black magic.

  Waite himself discouraged the Order of the Golden Dawn from practising ‘Magia’, the Renaissance term for white magic, and certainly he was opposed to any meddling in ‘Goetia’ or black magic. This was the chief reason why Aleister Crowley left the Order not long after its formation, preferring as he did to practise ‘Goetia’ combined with sexual promiscuity and drug taking. On the other hand Waite did write a good deal about all forms of magic, though he generally dismissed it, or pretended to dismiss it, as absurd and fantastic. His Book of Ceremonial Magic (1910) does include a number of spells, such as ‘To Become Invisible’, ‘A Conjuration to Lucifer’, and ‘How to Cause the Appearance of Three Ladies or Three Gentlemen in One’s Room after Supper’. But Waite presents this stuff in the form of a sceptical inquiry into magical procedure, and more probably Williams acquired his extensive knowledge of ‘Goetia’ from other sources, such as Aleister Crowley’s extravagant novel Moonchild (1929) and the stories of ‘Sax Rohmer’ (A. H. Ward), a fellow Golden Dawn member whose ‘Fu Manchu’ thrillers Williams much enjoyed. Whatever the sources, by the late nineteen-twenties Williams was thoroughly acquainted with the terminology and practices of black magic.

  A question which must strike anyone who reads his novels and notices the seriousness with which he presents magical events is: did he believe in it? It is very difficult to give a clear answer. Certainly he did not dismiss black magic as dangerous tomfoolery. To him it was as valid a form of symbolism as the symbols of Christianity. Whether it was more than symbolism to him, whether he thought it to be true, is difficult to say. To understand his attitude to magic one has to understand his attitude to the whole question of belief.

  ‘No one can possibly do more than decide what to believe,’ says a character in one of his novels, and that was exactly what Williams himself thought. He had decided to believe in Christianity, but it was a conscious choice. As far as witchcraft and black magic were concerned, he avoided making any such decision. He used them in his books, but he did not say, or ask his readers to say, ‘true or false?’ to such things. They were simply there. So, though he soon outgrew the Golden Dawn and left the Order (the date of this is not known), the symbolism and the knowledge of the occult that he had acquired during his membership remained valuable to him, not least because in its extreme form black magic was the polar opposite of Christianity; and his mind was always drawn to an awareness of the opposite pole of any argument or belief.

  Our Father who wert in heaven,

  A lonely road is Thine;

  Hardly after long travel

  Shall we reach to our design.

  He wrote these lines in a poem called ‘Witchcraft’, a hymn to Satan which is an investigation of the ‘oppositeness’ of the devil to Christ. And, as so often in his writings about black magic, there seems to be something more than a calm intellectual interest.

  Envy and Anger and Lust

  Are half the kin of Love,

  But Thy great throne is lifted

  All lesser thrones above.

  Whose sole joy is to see

  Love weep and bleed anew.

  O Terror! O Cruelty!

  O Hate! O Anguish of Joy!

  Make our hearts one with Thine

  To ravage and destroy.

  Certainly a reader unfamiliar with the character of Williams might suppose this poem to be the work of someone with a potential for cruelty. And this would be true.

  It was something that appeared more clearly in Williams’s later years, when his writings and the nature of his friendships gave him more opportunity to display it; but a sadistic element occasionally appears in his earlier work, such as the poem ‘Antichrist’ where, on beholding his beloved’s face grown unbearable, he declares:

  My mind possessed me with delight

  To wrack her lovely head

  With slow device of subtle pain.

  He was no Jekyll and Hyde: this sadistic element did not emerge at intervals to change his behaviour. Rather, it was constantly present, held in balance with the other aspects of his imagination.

  *

  Little is known about Charles and Michal Williams’s early married life. They rented a flat in the Hampstead district of London; Michal Williams taught for a few years in an elementary school; a son, confusingly christened Michael, was born to them in 1922, their only child; and that is about all that can be said. Williams’s poetry, of which three further volumes were published during these years, gives some idea of contented domesticity, but uses this only as a framework for theological preoccupations. So in the poem ‘To Michal meditating a new Costume’ he lovingly describes her dress but mentions this only because she is wearing it when they go ‘To keep the Mass of our New Year’. A poem about bringing breakfast to her in bed becomes the vehicle for an imaginary journey to ‘the land of the Trinity’, Sarras in the Arthurian legend of the Grail. Williams often said that he was proud to be one of the few poets who had made marriage a principal subject of verse, but in fact he did not discuss his marriage more than peripherally in his poems. There are also disquieting hints that all was not well, such as in ‘After Marriage’ where he speaks of the beloved as withdrawn from him, while he himself is ‘dispersed in ancient pain And into chaos plunged again’.

  Through his writings during the nineteen-twenties ran an increasing element of supernaturalism. He had never fully accepted the conventional distinction between natural and supernatural, or ‘Arch-natural’ as he preferred to call it; and as the years passed he came to feel that no barrier really existed between the two states, and that the supernatural was constantly present, requiring only extra awareness from the beholder to make it visible. This idea runs through his early poetry. A motor bus lumbering down from Golders Green into Hertfordshire seems to be a long narrow coffin in which he rides, with Death as a fellow passenger. A city pavement may suddenly melt away and reveal the ‘firmer under-stone’ of the eternal City of God. A prearranged meeting with someone on a street corner may never take place because the other person has accidentally slipped into another time-scale. And in performing simple domestic chores – lighting a fire, having a bath, or going down to the cellar to fetch something – he encounters a host of apparitions. The cellar steps lead into Hell itself, the match he puts to the fire is the flame which kindled Joan of Arc’s burning at the stake, and even the seemingly innocent bathwater is the sea in which men are drowning.

  These last experiences are described in a poem ironically called ‘Domesticity’, and besides showing Williams’s interest in the supernatural they are also a demonstration of something which was becoming very important in his thought. It had begun during the 1914–18 war, in which he had been unable to fight – he was declared unfit because of what was called ‘lack of nervous co-ordination’, the physical state that demonstrated itself in the trembling of his hands. During the war his two closest friends from the Working Men’s College were killed. At the time Williams was greatly distressed that they should have sacrificed themselves (as it seemed) on his behalf. Worse still, because of his growing habit of ignoring conventional distinctions of time and space he
could not feel that their deaths were something which had happened elsewhere and in the past, and were now over. To him the whole thing was constantly happening. The clink of teacups at his own breakfast table seemed to him to be the tin mugs passing from hand to hand while dying men were crying for drink in no-man’s-land. This may seem like a casual poetic fancy, but it was not. Such was his imagination that he could feel it acutely. It ceased to be painful to him only when he moved on to an awareness that all human action, whether death in war or the ordinary tasks of daily life, benefits or harms other human beings: all live in a greater framework in which every event has a bearing on something else. Expressed like this, it does not sound very remarkable. But it was important to Williams in that it became the basis of all his mature work.

  *

  In 1924 the Oxford University Press moved into larger premises. This was Amen House, in Warwick Square, a fine building partly dating from the Restoration. Its elegant formality delighted Williams and confirmed his vision of the Press and the City around it as part of some great ritual. This vision also gained strength from the character of the man who now ruled over the Press, Humphrey Milford.

  To Charles Williams, Milford (who became the Publisher in 1913) seemed to contain in his person the perfect expression of authority. Changeable in manner, he could by turns be formal and friendly, approachable and chillingly remote. But at all times he bore himself with the hierarchical dignity appropriate to his almost imperial power in the Press. Williams soon began to refer to him, only half jestingly, as ‘Caesar’.

  The move to Amen House was accompanied by an increase in staff, and a significant inauguration: the Library, a showroom to house a copy of each of the books published by the Press. The Library occupied a central position in the building, and it became an informal meeting-place for conversation and the exchange of ideas among those working in Amen House. The moving energy in many of these conversations was Charles Williams.