The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

By 1924 he was thirty-eight, and had already spent sixteen years with the Press. Though he had begun humbly as a proof reader, his wide knowledge of literature and his passionate devotion to poetry in particular had gradually gained him greater responsibilities, and he was now a valued member of the editorial department. But his office work at Amen House mattered much less to him than the friendships which grew from it.

  There were many on the staff of the Press with whom he found it easy to be friendly. Indeed he would be intimate with anyone who responded to him, for at a first meeting he would talk as if he had known you for years, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world to discuss poetry or theology with you. All that was needed was for you to accept this manner, and respond in kind, and then a friendship would begin. Many of the new staff at Amen House (as well as the longer-serving people) did respond, and ‘C. W.’ – as he was known among them – soon became the centre of a circle of friends, changing a place of work into a place of talk and friendship and delight.

  ‘C. W.’ himself was soon giving formal expression to his pleasure at these friendships in An Urbanity, a long poem that he addressed to Phyllis Jones, a young woman who had joined the staff in 1924 to take charge of the Library at Amen House. In it he lamented the absence on holiday of their particular friends, whose identity he lightly masked beneath poetic names chiefly taken from the genre of pastoral verse. ‘Dorinda’ was Miss Peacock from the Production Department, ‘Alexis’ and ‘Colin’ were Gerard Hopkins (nephew of the poet) who worked in Publicity and Fred Page, Williams’s office companion, while Phyllis Jones herself was ‘Phillida’ and Humphrey Milford was of course ‘Caesar’.

  An Urbanity was little more than an elegant jest. But it was soon followed by something that expressed Williams’s feelings about Amen House and its friendships more deeply. Retaining the assumed identities for his friends, he cast them as characters in a masque. They performed it in the Library on Humphrey Milford’s birthday in 1927, in front of a small invited audience presided over by Milford himself, for whom (by Williams’s direction) there was set, slightly forward from the rest, a throne-like seat appropriate for ‘Caesar’.

  The Masque of the Manuscript, as it was named, delicately mocked the absurdities of the publishing business. A worthy but dull Manuscript is eventually made acceptable for publication by the combined efforts of Dorinda, Alexis, Colin and Phillida. Then Caesar gives his consent, and the Manuscript – played by a female member of the cast – is placed on a bier and prepared for death. At last she rises, printed and bound and published. But the Masque is more than mockery, for it is concerned with the pursuit of truth, and ends with an epilogue on the dissolution of all mortal things, ‘Even the most precious talk of friends’.

  The Masque was a remarkable success. It created an extraordinary sense of delight in Amen House; for, by making the daily tasks of publishing into the stuff of poetry and ritual, Williams had transmuted a chore into something seemingly of wider significance. Nor did it end at the finish of the hour’s entertainment. In the months that followed, Williams continued to address his friends by their poetic names, so that they were caught up into a myth of his own devising. In the Library and on the staircase he would involve them in talk on a myriad of subjects, bringing out the best qualities in each of them. ‘He found the gold in all of us and made it shine,’ said one of them, Gerard Hopkins. ‘By sheer force of love and enthusiasm he created about him an atmosphere that must be unique in the history of business houses.’

  During the weeks immediately after the performance of The Masque of the Manuscript, Williams’s life was in many respects full of gaiety and hope. At Amen House he was, as he well knew, the cause of great happiness. Outside working hours he was now a regular lecturer at Evening Institutes, where he had already won the admiration and friendship of many members of his classes. Three volumes of his poetry had been published by the Press itself. He could almost have said that all was well. Almost, but not quite, for privately his life was dominated by one thing. He was in love with the Librarian at Amen House, Phyllis Jones.

  *

  Probably the marriage between Charles and Michal Williams had been tempestuous from the start. They were persons of strong character, and of very different ideas. He was absorbed in poetry and theological speculations, while she was practical-headed and liked to talk mostly about family or domestic matters. Charles tried to make a virtue of his wife’s domesticity, declaring his admiration for it; but it imposed a strain. Nor was their marriage greatly eased by the birth of their son in 1922, for Charles found the boy’s upbringing difficult to conduct, and discovered that his own close friendship with his father could not be repeated. Yet to explain his falling in love with another woman by saying that he was unhappy at home would be to fall short of understanding him entirely.

  He had never expected marriage to be blissful or easy. His outlook did not allow any such casual optimism. Indeed he may have made the opposite mistake of expecting and looking for the worst. In the poetry that he wrote during the long years of his betrothal to Michal he showed himself only too aware of her limitations, describing her as ‘wilful, insolent’, and ‘part scornful, part obsequious to the world’. Perhaps by the time they married he was no longer romantically in love with her. Certainly he had made himself ready for a change in his feelings by developing his ‘Romantic Theology’, as he now called it, his Dantean notion that human love is a ladder reaching up to God; for it seemed understandable to him that in climbing the ladder he should pass beyond the lower rungs, the youthful state of loving. But this had not prepared him for falling in love all over again.

  Phyllis Jones was in her early twenties when she joined the Press. She had been educated at London University and had worked as a teacher before being given a job by Humphrey Milford. As Librarian at Amen House she was based in the room where ‘C. W.’ conducted many of his most animated conversations. She was soon caught up in them, and soon too she began to find poems addressed to her and left on her desk. Gradually she discovered that Williams was in love with her.

  At first she loved him in return, and it was this – though almost nobody working at Amen House knew it1 – that was the immediate cause of An Urbanity and the Masque; or rather, Masques, for the first was soon followed by another in the same vein, The Masque of Perusal. In this second piece, when the vital question ‘Why do you publish?’ fails to find an answer it is Phillida (Phyllis Jones herself) who finally supplies the justification of the whole procedure, declaring that the Press serves the ends of ‘labour and purity and peace’.

  Perhaps Williams found a kind of peace in their love affair during these months. But it is difficult to imagine that he, given his nature and his view of the marriage vows, could ever have contemplated divorce or adultery. At all events neither took place.2 The only immediate physical result of his love for ‘Phillida’ was the constant stream of poems that he addressed to her. In these, he veiled her identity still further under the name ‘Celia’, which he took from Marvell’s ‘The Match’, a poem describing how one spark from Love sets aflame the whole of Nature. Because of this he called the experience of falling in love in this fashion ‘the Celian moment’. But it did not last. The feelings of ‘Celia’ changed, and soon she was in love with another member of the staff at Amen House.

  This had a remarkable effect on Williams. He was desolate: in fact he never entirely came to terms with it. But he was also spurred by it into beginning his mature work as a writer.

  *

  In the fifth act of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, it suddenly becomes plain to Troilus that his beloved Cressida, of whose love he was until that moment utterly sure, is not the changeless and unchangeable creature he had believed her to be. She is mutable: in fact she is faithless, is dallying with Diomedes. Troilus observes this – and declares that he has seen the impossible. When asked to explain what Cressida has done, he replies:

  Nothing at all, unless that this were she.

 
The Cressida who has been faithless must be someone else. She cannot be the same Cressida who loves him. But she is. And Troilus ‘undergoes an entire subversion of his whole experience’.

  These last words are by Charles Williams, who wrote at some length on this passage in Troilus and Cressida. Indeed he regarded it as crucially important not merely for this play but for the whole of Shakespeare’s work, declaring that in this one line Shakespeare achieves a hitherto unequalled complexity of expression. He also looked for, and found, similar moments of equal importance in the work of other great poets, and concluded that it is at such moments that we can observe ‘the passing of the poetic genius from its earlier states into its full strength’. He developed this theory into the central argument of his book The English Poetic Mind, applying it to the work of Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson. Sometimes it fits the evidence very well, sometimes less so. In fact Williams would probably not have pressed the theory so hard had it not related closely to his own experience.

  Up to this time he had lived, on the whole, according to his own plan. His intellect rose above those of almost all around him, and he was able to direct his life largely on his own terms. Certain things such as worry about money or domestic crises might cause ripples on the surface of his existence, but they did not reach to the depths of his being. He was able to embrace everything – belief and doubt, hope and disillusion, love and hatred – within the secure irony that he had developed. That irony had served to encompass the breakdown of romantic love within his marriage; it had served to create a unique half-serious half-playful ceremony of friendships at Amen House; it had even perhaps served to explain the fact that he, who had believed himself to be the poet of married love, should find himself in love extramaritally. But it had not prepared him for action taken by another person – for his rejection by ‘Celia’.

  That she did reject him was in fact not surprising. She wrote long afterwards: ‘When one reads of the unhappy love affairs of poets, one feels how mean were the objects of their affections, and why couldn’t they have given more? But the reality of such situations is more difficult.’ Two things in particular made her draw back from him. The first was that he wanted her not merely to accept the poems he addressed to her, but to respond to them with intelligence and vitality; and she found it impossible to sustain this kind of response with freshness when new poems arrived on her desk almost every day. There was also his fondness for inflicting pain, though this showed itself in a harmless way. He would set her mock ‘examination papers’ on the English poets, partly through a real wish to improve her knowledge, but also so that he could threaten that if ‘the candidate’ failed to achieve the desired mark, she would be spanked on the hand with a ruler. So she withdrew, and turned to another, whose office was, ironically, directly beneath Williams’s; the sound of their voices, filtering through the floorboards, caused him agonies of jealousy. Though her rejection of him was not sudden or surprising – nor entirely one-sided, for his feelings towards her had changed a little because of her seeming indifference to his poetry – the distress of it did not leave him, not least because she was still one of his daily companions at Amen House, his friend and yet totally isolated from him, Celia and not Celia, Cressida and not Cressida.

  This she? no, this is Diomed’s Cressida.

  ‘How dreadful’, Williams wrote five years after the ending of the affair, ‘is the exalted head of the beloved moving serenely above and apart from one! Well – here are five years of pain, and still the victory is unachieved, partly because the will is not yet converted.’ In 1934 ‘Celia’ left Amen House, was married, and went to Java with her husband. Yet Williams’s feelings for her lasted for the rest of his life. In 1940 he wrote: ‘There can be few people who have behaved to each other with the same criminal lunacy, the same insane fidelity of attachment, the same throwing over and the same continual returns, the same insults and injuries, and the same devotion and peace and need, as Celia and I.’

  What Williams called the ‘great period’ of the love affair came to an end soon after the first Masque in 1927. Shortly afterwards, there began his enormous outpouring of books: seven novels, more than a dozen plays, three volumes of literary criticism, a handful of biographies, several books of theology, and a lengthy and complex cycle of Arthurian poetry.

  *

  The ‘Celian experience’ itself was the subject of one of his first writings after the event had occurred. This was The Chaste Wanton, of which the title was casually suggested by Williams’s friend Gerard Hopkins as suitable for a mock-Elizabethan play. Mock-Elizabethan it certainly was, for Williams had not yet found his own poetic style, and he depended, as his first four volumes of poetry show, on borrowing techniques from those poets he admired. The Chaste Wanton was stylistically a pastiche of Shakespeare. Yet though its form was second-hand its content was highly personal.

  Set in an Italian ducal town of the Renaissance, the play begins with the meeting of the Duchess, young and beautiful but restless and as yet unfulfilled in life, with the middle-aged alchemist Vicenzo. He arrives at her court, falls in love with her, and works a great change in her. He teaches her (in fact) the true nature of love, showing her, as Williams showed ‘Celia’ and others, by means of his Romantic Theology, how the process of loving can be ‘commerce with heaven’, a ladder to beatitude. And at first the Duchess returns his love. But it would not be an appropriate marriage, between a Duchess and a mere alchemist. Meanwhile the Prince of Padua is asking for the Duchess’s hand, and he of course is an ideal suitor, even though he could never have worked the great change which now capacitates her for love. She chooses, in the event, to accept Padua and to use what Vicenzo has taught her to illuminate her marriage to the prince. Vicenzo hears the marriage treaty proclaimed; then he is told, ‘The Duchess, sir, requires you; follow to her.’

  Vicenzo:

  I – follow?

  Adrian:

  Sir, the Duchess bade –

  Vicenzo:

  There is none.

  None, none, no Duchess. It is Tartary you speak of; there are Khans and Khanims …

  It is Troilus all over again: ‘This she? no, this is Diomed’s Cressida.’ And now everything is lost for Vicenzo. ‘I would be somebody in heaven,’ he declares, ‘and now I am forever nothing and in hell.’

  This death of love is followed by physical death. Among those at the court is the Bishop, who when the marriage is announced talks to Vicenzo in absurd platitudes about how the youthful romantic love of the Duchess and Padua will eventually mature into ‘good works and decent frame, Quiet moderation of a happy hearth’. This was the kind of banality that Williams often found to be characteristic of the official Church’s attitude to love – the very opposite of his Romantic Theology with its belief that love can lead ever upwards to higher states of vision and experience. Vicenzo responds in a fury, crying out: ‘The void! the void! the utterance of the void!’ and leaps at the Bishop, who falls and strikes his head against a stone seat. It is not clear whether the Bishop dies as a result – in his plays, Williams was often very bad at explaining what was actually going on – but the incident is enough to condemn Vicenzo to death. The Duchess comes to him in his cell and, though she hesitates to do so, Vicenzo bids her sign his death warrant. She has killed their love, so it is a small matter by comparison to kill his body. She signs it, and they part.

  At the conclusion of The Chaste Wanton Charles Williams turned away from love. This play – never performed during his lifetime – was his record of the delight and tragedy of his ‘Celian experience’. The experience was never repeated, for he did not fall in love again. Nor did he ever again use romantic love alone as the central matter of his writings. His Romantic Theology was to play a vital part in his work, but merely human love never concerned him again for its own sake. It was perhaps too painful; it was certainly a stage which he felt he had now left behind. For though he still regarded the death of the love affair with ‘Celia’ as a tragedy, he see
ms also to have thought of it as a refining fire which had purged his imagination and fitted it for higher things. The immediate result was a novel.

  *

  It was called Shadows of Ecstasy, and it was (as a character in it remarked) ‘all such a mad mixture, purple rhetoric and precise realism, doctrines of transmutation and babble about African witch-doctors and airships and submarines’. Indeed it was one of the oddest books ever to go under the name of novel.

  Its lack of interest in ordinary character portrayal was striking – though certainly one of the principal characters, Roger Ingram the Professor of Applied Literature at London University, was recognisable as bearing a superficial resemblance to Williams himself. Ingram is committed to applying literature to his own and other people’s lives, rather than, as he puts it, ‘embalming’ it in the manner of many literary critics. He declares of the study of poetry: ‘You’ve nearly killed it, with your appreciations and your fastidious judgements, and your lives of this man and your studies in that. Love and poetry are powers. Power, power, it’s dying in you, and you don’t hunger to feel it live.’ It was the first appearance of the theme of power, a theme which ran through all Williams’s early novels.

  Ingram soon encounters someone who shares his recognition that poetry is a living force or energy, someone who (and this is the central point of the novel) can show him how to use that energy to give himself strength. This is Considine, a man who claims to have conquered death, and who has already lived for two hundred years. Considine has done this, he says, by turning the force of all emotional experiences inward upon himself, so that instead of pouring his energy out as other men do in love and hate, joy and misery, he can convert the strength of these feelings into a form of power which will infinitely prolong his physical life. ‘I have poured the strength of every love and hate into my own life,’ he tells Ingram, ‘and now I need love and hate no more.’ Considine explains that he learnt this in his youth when he was rejected by a girl he loved, and, experiencing severe emotional pain, said to himself, ‘If this pain were itself power …’ Now he can transmute – and can show others how to transmute – all sexual energy into such self-strengthening power; and not just sexual energy, but all such forces of the emotions. Ingram hesitates, but eventually commits himself to becoming a disciple of this superman, and begins to experience the strengthening force of emotion turned back into his own life. However, Considine is murdered by a jealous follower, and at the end of the book Ingram is left desolate, wondering whether Considine can indeed conquer death and return to the living.