The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  This was not the usual stuff of London County Council evening classes, but many of his audience found it magnificent. And if they became friends with him, it was only the first of several metaphysical notions with which he presented them. Those who showed themselves particularly sympathetic to his ideas were told that they might like to regard themselves as one of the ‘Companions of the Co-inherence.’

  *

  It was not Williams’s own idea to form an Order. The impetus to establish it came from his disciples, and for a long time he was reluctant to do any such thing. But at last he agreed to permit those who desired it to call themselves members of a Company, and in time he came to like the idea. Some years later he expressed the nature of such a body in a poem which was part of his Arthurian cycle, ‘The Founding of the Company’:

  Grounded in the Acts of the Throne and the pacts of the themes,

  it lived only by conceded recollection,

  having no decision, no vote or admission,

  but for the single note that any soul

  took of its own election of the Way; the whole

  shaped no frame nor titular claim to place.

  The ‘Companions of the Co-inherence’ (the name generally given to the group, though it was often referred to as ‘the Household’ or ‘the Company’) took their title from one of Williams’s central ideas, which had first grown in his mind during the 1914–18 war, when his grief at the death of the two close friends of his Working Men’s College days eventually persuaded him that all human beings are totally dependent on each other, that indeed ‘no man is an Island’, and that each thought or action has a bearing on other people. This idea he called Co-inherence, and he developed it further, suggesting that even evil actions will produce good and that many good things will lead to evil. There is, he believed, an enormous potential both for good and evil in every piece of human behaviour. Not that this argued against there being such a thing as sin. ‘Sin’, he said, ‘is the preference of an immediately satisfying experience to the declared pattern of the universe’; and it is, he said, the Christian’s duty to perceive that pattern (‘the eternal dance’ he called it in The Greater Trumps) and to act according to it.

  Williams’s ‘Co-inherence’ harmonised with orthodox Christian teaching. But others of his doctrines which the Companions were asked to observe and practise were less conventional.

  First was Romantic Theology. He impressed upon those close to him that lovers should see in each other a reflection of God, that in the beauty of the beloved ‘an explanation of the whole universe is being offered, and indeed in some sense understood; only it cannot be defined’. Romantic Theology was not peculiar to Williams – he had found it, of course, in Dante – but it was more idiosyncratic than Co-inherence, and when he drafted a book on it in the early nineteen-twenties and offered it to the Press, Humphrey Milford was distinctly dubious, and sent the manuscript to an adviser for comment. Unfortunately for Williams that adviser was ‘Tommy’ Strong, the Bishop of Oxford, who was not only a bachelor but reputedly a misogynist. Not surprisingly Strong did not recommend that ‘Outlines of Romantic Theology’ be published, and the book remained in manuscript, its contents gradually being absorbed into Williams’s other writings during the succeeding years.

  The real gulf between Williams and such churchmen as Strong was not in their attitudes to women but in their approach to the Christian life. Indeed, Williams was steering a markedly different course from that chosen by the majority of Christian teachers over the centuries. Traditionally, the Church has more often emphasised asceticism and the rejection of worldly enjoyment than the alternative, the transmutation of the delights of the world into the Christian vision. But it was this last method which Williams adhered to. He called it The Way of Affirmation, as opposed to the ascetic Way of Rejection. His Romantic Theology was ‘affirmative’ in that it used worldly love as its starting-point rather than rejecting it in favour of an ascetic life; and there was Affirmation too in Williams’s other principal doctrine which was practised by the Companions of the Co-inherence: the practice of ‘Substitution’ or ‘Substituted Love’. This doctrine was not developed by Williams until some years after he had outlined Romantic Theology, and it was never communicated to Bishop Strong, which was perhaps just as well; for that ecclesiastical dignitary would undoubtedly have been highly perturbed by it.

  The first notion of Substitution occurred to Williams in 1932. ‘I have a point to discuss with you’, he wrote to a young friend from the evening classes, Thelma Shuttleworth, ‘which makes me wonder whether the New Testament may not be merely true in some of its advice. All about “bearing one another’s burdens”. I have an awful (full of awe) feeling that one can.’

  In his thinking and writings Williams had already paid much attention to the metaphorical implications of ‘bear ye one another’s burdens’. It was a natural development from Co-inherence to observe the degree in which human life depends on the principle of exchange, on the sharing of tasks and responsibilities. Mundane forms of this exchange include commerce (where money is offered in return for goods) and professional and business life (where members of the community undertake specialised responsibilities by which they serve others). These mundane exchanges can of course be seen in any city, and this helped to strengthen Williams’s notion of cities in general and the City of London in particular as a type of the City of God, for he believed that Exchange was a heavenly principle. But as to the literal implications of St Paul’s words about bearing one another’s burdens, that was another matter.

  Could personal burdens be born by others? Could, for example, someone racked by worry or anxiety pass that particular emotional burden to someone else who had agreed voluntarily to accept it? Williams came to believe that this could in fact be done, simply by a mutual pact, came to believe even that actual physical pain could be taken over by someone who was willing to substitute himself or herself for the sufferer. And this Substitution became an important activity of the Companions of the Co-inherence.1

  *

  Did it work? Certainly a number of responsible and sensible people who knew Williams were strongly persuaded that it did. It was after all in spirit entirely Christian – Williams regarded the Crucifixion as the ultimate Substitution, by which Christ offered his own suffering for the sins of the world. On the other hand, like so much of Williams’s thought, it did have an air of the magical. And did Williams have any right to assume authority in it, instructing (as he sometimes did) one of the Companions to substitute herself for another who was going through some physical or emotional difficulty?

  ‘Substitution’ played quite a large part in Williams’s letters to the Companions and to other friends and admirers. And though his letters did not deal only with such spiritual matters – he often discussed his poetry, or the absurdities of daily life, all with a delightfully wry wit2 – they tended, as one of his disciples in the nineteen-forties, Lois Lang-Sims, remarked, to consist of ‘a tremendous flow of words’. The letters were also open to misinterpretation. ‘My dear Thelma,’ he began one such letter,

  I very nearly adore you. In fact I do; so that you can say, as the Angel in the Apocalypse said to the Divine John, ‘See thou do it not’. But one may adore Love-in-Thelma, and think that the dwelling place of the Eternal that dwelleth in the heavens is a very transmuting one. Remember that you are more lucid, more beautiful, more Love. I add in a postscript that you are as divine a creature as I have ever known in this high pursuit of Love.

  Thelma Shuttleworth was wise enough in the ways of Charles Williams to know that this was a demonstration of Romantic Theology rather than of erotic passion. She recalled of these years, ‘We were together in love, though never with one another.’ But others did not find it so easy to make the distinction, or did not care to. ‘I was by this time’, wrote Lois Lang-Sims of her growing feelings for Williams, ‘“in love” with Charles in the sense that I wanted to be his mistress.’

  He never took sexual a
dvantage of any of his disciples who found themselves in this state of mind; or at least he did not do so in the conventional sense. His general rule, as C. S. Lewis observed, was ‘to teach them the ars honesta amandi and then bestow them on other (younger) men’. On the other hand Lois Lang-Sims alleges that on one occasion he put his arms round her and ‘held me in a strange stillness, a silence so unlike his usual loquacity, a motionlessness so unlike his usual excitement, that nothing could have been further from the kind of behaviour my previous knowledge of him had led me to expect’. At the time she was greatly puzzled, not to say alarmed. Later she thought she recognised in this behaviour a kind of ritual that was sometimes practised by magical sects, and even by some early Christians until the practice was strongly suppressed in the Church, a ritual that attempts to heighten consciousness and increase power by harnessing the sexual instinct, and achieving a kind of tension-of-polarity between desire and restraint. If Lois Lang-Sims was right,1 Williams was actually putting into practice the kind of thing he had hinted at some years earlier in Shadows of Ecstasy, where a young lover sees in his mind the naked physical beauty of his beloved, but instead of aiming his desires towards sexual consummation ‘seemed to control and compel them into subterranean torrents towards hidden necessities within him’.

  Those of Williams’s disciples who confessed to small failures or a general lapse of conduct would find that he imposed some small penance upon them; for instance, ‘You’ll copy out for me the first twelve verses of the 52nd chapter of Isaiah: you will do this as soon as you can, and you’ll learn the first three verses by heart.’ Occasionally too there was evidence here of the sadistic element in his personality, for he would sometimes threaten a whipping as a punishment for misbehaviour. But this remained in the realm of fantasy.

  Williams himself had no delusions about his own personality. ‘God forbid I should call myself an apostle!’ he told Thelma Shuttleworth. ‘I am the least – O unworthy, unworthy! – of all.’ But he believed firmly that his own failings made not a jot of difference to the validity of his teaching. ‘St Paul knew that it is possible to preach to others and yet to be a castaway,’ he wrote. ‘Only – and this the fools sometimes forget – the preaching is true all the same.’

  He often emphasised this point in his writings. Of the poet Peter Stanhope in the novel Descent into Hell – a character undoubtedly based on what Williams would have liked to be1 – it is said: ‘Whether his personal life could move to the sound of his own lucid exaltation of verse she [Pauline Anstruther] did not know. It was not her business; perhaps it was not even his.’ And when discussing Dante and the Way of Affirmation (i.e. Romantic Theology), Williams declares: ‘We do not know if, or how far, Dante himself in his personal life cared or was able to follow the Way he defined, nor is it our business.’ These remarks ought to be remembered during any investigation of Williams’s own life. Moreover, the personality expressed in his writings and remembered by his friends did show a positive quality of inner calm, of humility; so that it is possible to understand how T. S. Eliot could say of Williams, ‘He seemed to me to approximate, more nearly than any man I have known familiarly, to the saint.’

  *

  ‘What finally convinced me that he has written a great poem was a transformation which my judgment underwent in reading it.’ The periodical in which this review appeared was Theology for April 1939; the reviewer was C. S. Lewis. After long effort, Williams had published the first volume of his cycle of Arthurian poetry, Taliessin through Logres.

  ‘I liked its “flavour” from the first,’ wrote Lewis, ‘but found it so idiosyncratic that I thought the book might be what Lamb called a “favourite”, a thing not for all days or all palates, like Tristram Shandy or the Arcadia. But as I went on I found bit after bit of my “real world” falling into its place in the poem. I found pair after pair of opposites harmoniously reconciled. I began to see that what had seemed a deliciously private universe was the common universe after all: that this apparently romantic and even wilful poem was really “classic” and central. I do not think this can happen in a minor work.’

  After their first meeting at which he had been captivated by Williams, Lewis continued to see him as often as possible, though the friendship was limited by the distance between Oxford and London. Occasionally Williams came down to visit Lewis at Magdalen; more often the meetings were in London, either in Williams’s tiny office at Amen House or at his favourite lunch-place, Shirreff’s under the railway arch in Ludgate Hill. Williams usually had nothing more than a sandwich for his lunch, but on one memorable occasion in 1938 Lewis brought his brother Warnie and Hugo Dyson with him from Oxford, and they all ate (said Lewis) ‘kidneys enclosed, like the wicked man, in their own fat’. After lunch they walked about and sat in St Paul’s churchyard, conducting what Lewis afterwards remembered as an ‘almost Platonic discussion’.

  Lewis and Williams continued to profess enthusiasm for each other’s writings. When in 1938 Williams published what might be called a ‘handlist’ of his interpretations of Christian doctrine, He Came Down From Heaven, he referred in it to Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, which he called ‘one of the most important critical books of our time’. Lewis was equally enthusiastic about Taliessin through Logres when it appeared in the same year, and his support was especially valuable to Williams, because otherwise the book met with little success.

  This was scarcely surprising, for the poems it contained were extremely difficult to understand, even by the standard of Williams’s other writings. He paid little attention to the central events of the Arthurian story but concentrated on lesser-known details from Malory, and introduced other figures, most notably Taliessin, the poet of Celtic legend, whom he made King’s Poet at Arthur’s court – and whose character and role had a relation to Williams’s own idea of himself. He named Arthur’s kingdom ‘Logres’, using a Celtic word for Britain, and he made Logres a province of ‘The Empire’, by which he meant literally the Byzantine Empire and metaphorically the Kingdom of God on earth. Geographical features of his Arthurian landscape included not just Malory’s ‘Carbonek’ (the Grail castle) and ‘Sarras’ (the earthly paradise or ‘land of the Trinity’) but also ‘Broceliande’, a forest of metaphysical rather than physical character, a ‘place of making’ from which both good and evil may come; and there was also ‘P’o-l’u’, the antipodean seat of a diabolical Anti-Emperor. This name was a private jest, though a sad one, for Williams had found ‘P’o-l’u’ on a map of Java, and it was to Java that his Celia had gone after her marriage. On top of all this was an extra layer of symbolism, by which different parts of the human body were chosen to represent different provinces of the Empire: the head for Logres, the breasts for Gaul, the buttocks for Caucasia; while these provinces themselves represented spiritual characteristics. Williams had adapted this idea from the Sephirotic Tree in A. E. Waite’s Secret Doctrine in Israel, and he used it literally ‘on top’ of the geography of his Arthurian poems, for on the endpapers of Taliessin through Logres was printed a map of the Empire with a naked female body superimposed.

  Taliessin went almost unnoticed. It was meant by Williams to be the finest expression of his thought, and he had taken many years over the development of the poems in it, the majority of which were far more modern in style than his earlier verse; they showed some influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the collected edition of whose poems he had revised for the Press, and they had also benefited from the advice of a friend, the young poet Anne Ridler. But for the most part they were incomprehensible to anyone not entirely conversant with Williams’s ideas. ‘Taliessin through Logres contained some beautiful poetry,’ wrote T. S. Eliot a year after the book was published, ‘but also some of the most obscure poetry that was ever written.’

  Williams was in fact having little popular success with any of his books, though this was not for lack of trying. During the nineteen-thirties his output was immense. Besides the poetry there were three volumes of literary criticism, several
plays (including Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury which was performed at the Canterbury Festival the year after Murder in the Cathedral), two theological books (He Came Down From Heaven and The Descent of the Dove), innumerable book reviews for newspapers and for Time & Tide, and five historical biographies, of Henry VII, Elizabeth, James I, Bacon, and the Restoration poet Rochester. He also wrote a number of articles, edited The New Book of English Verse for Gollancz, revised the Bridges edition of Hopkins’ poems, and contributed to several anthologies for the Oxford University Press. And on top of this there were the novels.

  The historical biographies were the product of an intimate knowledge of their subjects and periods, but they were undertaken to earn money and were written in a hurry. Inevitably they often revealed themselves as pot-boilers. ‘He always boiled an honest pot,’ said T. S. Eliot of them; but too often Williams resorted to stylistic mannerisms. Graham Greene, reviewing Rochester, singled out this passage: