The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  ‘On Monday’, he wrote, ‘C. W. lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about “the sage and serious doctrine of virginity” which it would never occur to the ordinary modern critic to take seriously. But it was more important still as a sermon. It was a beautiful sight to see a whole room full of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which can not be faked, very puzzled, but spell-bound: perhaps with something of the same feeling which a lecture on unchastity might have evoked in their grandparents – the forbidden subject broached at last. He forced them to lap it up and I think many, by the end, liked the taste more than they expected to. It was “borne in upon me” that that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do; teaching wisdom.’

  Williams himself was pleased by the reception of the lecture, and in particular by the enthusiastic response of Lewis and his friends. Indeed it began to seem to him that he could number among his followers a band of men, as well as the young women who had till now been in the majority. ‘Am I only to be followed by the feminine?’ he asked his wife in one of his typically florid letters to her. ‘No; you will be attended – you – by the masculine minds: great minds, strong males, brothers of our energy – those who know our work – Lewis – and Tolkien …’

  2

  ‘We had nothing to say to one another’

  If Charles Williams thought that he could number Tolkien among his followers he was mistaken. From the beginning of their acquaintance Tolkien was to some extent suspicious of Williams. This was understandable, for while Williams and Lewis had got to know each other by admiring each other’s books Tolkien simply had Williams thrust upon him. The first thing he knew about Williams was Lewis declaring that he had made the acquaintance of a most marvellous person, and that he (Tolkien) would undoubtedly love Williams as soon as he met him. The most generous-hearted person would have been a little suspicious of this, and Tolkien responded by becoming faintly jealous. Lewis’s friendship meant very much to him, and he did not altogether care for the sudden arrival of Williams at a high place in Lewis’s affections. From the beginning, therefore, he was on his guard; and of Lewis’s feelings towards Williams, he said that Lewis was ‘a very impressionable, too impressionable, man’.

  Some years later, Lewis wrote that by 1939 Williams ‘had already become as dear to all my Oxford friends as he had to me’. But next to these words in his own copy of the book in which they appeared, Tolkien wrote: ‘Alas no! In any case I had hardly ever seen him till he came to live in Oxford.’

  Now that Williams was in Oxford, Tolkien had to put up with something very like hero-worship on Lewis’s part. For instance, Lewis told a friend: ‘If you were going up the High in a bus and saw Charles Williams walking along the pavement among a crowd of people, you would immediately single him out because he looked godlike; rather, like an angel.’ It so happened that the person to whom this remark was made, Lewis’s pupil Peter Bayley, had indeed seen Williams from the top of an Oxford bus. ‘To my eyes,’ he said, ‘he looked like a clerk or craftsman in a small line of business – perhaps a joiner or carpenter; but I thought there was nothing godlike or angelic about him.’

  Tolkien would have agreed. He liked Williams, but he did not regard him as even remotely angelic. Lewis declared of Williams: ‘In every circle that he entered, he gave the whole man.’ But Tolkien commented on this: ‘No, I think not.’ Tolkien was perhaps more perceptive than Lewis about Williams’s character; he may have realised that behind Williams’s ebullience in conversation there was an inner nature which rarely showed itself. Certainly he had distinct doubts about some of Williams’s ideas.

  ‘I was and remain wholly unsympathetic to Williams’ mind,’ Tolkien wrote in 1965. ‘I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C. S. L. whom I met in his company during the period when, owing to the War, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels. I doubt if he had read anything of mine then available; I had read or heard a good deal of his work, but found it wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous. (This is perfectly true as a general statement, but is not intended as a criticism of Williams; rather it is an exhibition of my own limits of sympathy. And of course in so large a range of work I found lines, passages, scenes, and thoughts that I found striking.) I remained entirely unmoved. Lewis was bowled over. But Lewis was a very impressionable man, and this was abetted by his great generosity and capacity for friendship.’

  Tolkien did not specify what it was in Williams’s work that he found distasteful, but once in his old age he referred to Williams as ‘a witch doctor’. Certainly he was aware – perhaps more than Lewis was – of the importance of black magic and devilry in some of Williams’s books. Tolkien himself had a profound belief in the devil and all his works, and he did not think that such things should be bandied about in popular novels.

  On the purely personal level, Tolkien was perhaps a little resentful of Williams’s intrusion into the Monday morning talks with Lewis which he had enjoyed for nearly ten years. Since the early nineteen-thirties, Monday had been the day when the two men talked, and drank beer at the Eastgate; but now Williams generally made a third at these sessions. Moreover, the conversation became as a result more generally literary than Tolkien always cared for. He himself was not widely read in English literature after Chaucer, and he had few favourites among later writers. On the other hand Williams and Lewis liked almost everything. ‘This morning I reached Magdalen at 11 a.m.,’ Tolkien recorded one Monday, ‘and spent two hours with C. S. L. and C. W. It was very enjoyable. We talked a good deal about “prosody” and (more than I cared for) about C. Lamb: an author that I find no use for, I fear.’

  On the other hand Tolkien’s emphatic declarations that he and Williams had nothing in common intellectually, and had no sympathy for each other’s work, were made long after the event. They were also prompted by the suggestion that he and Williams might have ‘influenced’ each other’s work, a suggestion that Tolkien was very eager to contradict. There is in fact much to suggest that at the time die two men got on extremely well, and did have something to say to each other ‘at deeper (or higher) levels’.

  Certainly there were many meetings between them, more than there would have been had any real antipathy existed. They often drank beer together, especially in the Eagle and Child public house in St Giles, a favourite haunt of Lewis and his friends, which was generally known as ‘The Bird and Baby’ because of its signboard depicting the infant Ganymede being carried off by Jove’s eagle. ‘Had a glass and half an hour at the B & B with Charles Williams,’ Tolkien noted one Tuesday morning, Tuesday being the day on which the Inklings had taken to gathering at lunch time in that pub; and such meetings between him and Williams were frequent. And there were certainly some occasions when the two men did talk seriously. One such was a Thursday night when Tolkien was walking home after a Magdalen session of the Inklings. As he lived in North Oxford his journey took him past Williams’s front door in South Parks Road. ‘I did not start home till midnight,’ Tolkien recorded, ‘and walked with C. W. part of the way, when our converse turned on the difficulty of discovering what common factors if any existed in the notions associated with freedom as used at present. I don’t believe there are any, for the word has been so abused by propaganda that it has ceased to have any value for reason, and become a mere emotional dose for generating heat.’ Williams had much to say on this subject, for he believed that the only way to find real freedom was to submit oneself to the rule of God. ‘The only freedom,’ he said, ‘is a freedom to choose obedience’; and this formed the theme of one of the
poems he was writing for a second Taliessin volume. The poem, ‘The Departure of Dindrane’, told how a slave-girl at Arthur’s court is faced with a choice of continuing in servitude or of freedom to lead her own life; in the end she chooses servitude. ‘In her heart,’ wrote Williams,

  servitude and freedom were one and interchangeable.

  Tolkien was not being fair if he meant to suggest, twenty years later, that Williams had no interest in his writings. The sequel to The Hobbit, already entitled The Lord of the Rings, was being read aloud to the Inklings as Tolkien wrote it, and during the years in which he was a member of the group Williams heard most of it. He was in fact far more enthusiastic about it than were some of the other Inklings, and five years after he came to live in Oxford he borrowed the entire typescript, as far as it was then complete, so that he could refresh his memory. ‘C. Williams who is reading it all’, Tolkien noted at the time, ‘says the great thing is that its centre is not in strife and war and heroism (though they are all understood and depicted) but in freedom, peace, ordinary life and good living. Yet he agrees that these very things require the existence of a great world outside the Shire – lest they should grow stale by custom and turn into the humdrum.’

  On the other hand Tolkien’s sympathy for Williams’s work was certainly limited. He did not claim to understand more than the rudiments of Williams’s poetry, nor did he find it attractive. The Byzantine setting of some of the Taliessin poems irritated him, while the overlaying of geography and symbolism made no impact on his imagination at all. Williams’s use of such apparently unrelated geographical features as Logres, Mount Elburz and P’o-l’u was puzzling enough to him without the symbolism of the human body that was combined with it – the symbolism which for instance identified Caucasia with the buttocks. This was not the sort of myth making that seemed to have any ‘truth’ to Tolkien. Yet he listened with full attention when Williams read the poems aloud to the Inklings; and, if Williams’s ideas did not appeal, then the man himself (he found) was undeniably charming – as Tolkien declared in this poem which he wrote some time during the war.

  ‘Our dear Charles Williams many guises shows:

  the novelist comes first. I find his prose

  obscure at times. Not easily it flows;

  too often are his lights held up in brackets.

  Yet error, should he spot it, he’ll attack its

  sources and head, exposing ramps and rackets,

  the tortuous byways of the wicked heart

  and intellect corrupt. Yea, many a dart

  he crosses with the fiery ones! The art

  of minor fiends and major he reveals –

  when Charles is on his trail the devil squeals,

  for cloven feet have vulnerable heels.

  ‘But heavenly footsteps, too, can Williams trace,

  and after Dante, plunging, soaring, race

  up to the threshold of Eternal Grace.

  The limits of all fallen men, maybe,

  (or mine alone, perhaps) explain why he

  seems best to understand of all the three

  Inferno’s dark involved geography.

  ‘Geography indeed! Here he again

  exerts a subtle mind and labouring pen.

  Geodesy say rather; for many a ‘fen’1

  he wrote, and chapters bogged in tangled rhymes,

  and has surveyed Europa’s lands and climes,

  dividing her from P’o-L’u’s crawling slimes,

  in her diving buttocks, breast, and head

  (to say no fouler thing), where I instead,

  dull-eyed, can only see a watershed,

  a plain, an island, or a mountain-chain.

  In that gynecomorphical terrain

  History and Myth are ravelled in a skein

  of endless interchange. I do not hope

  to understand the deeds of king or pope,

  wizard or emperor;2 beyond my scope

  is that dark flux of symbol and event,

  where fable, faith, and faerie are blent

  with half-guessed meanings to some great intent

  I cannot grasp. For Mount Elburz3 to me

  is but a high peak far beyond the sea

  (and high and far I’d ever have it be).

  ‘The Throne, the war-lords, and the logothetes,

  the endless steps, the domes, the crowded streets,

  the tolls, the taxes, the commercial fleets,4

  Byzantium, New Rome! I love her less

  than Rome the Old. For War, I must confess,

  Eagles to me no more than Ravens bless,

  no more than Fylfot, or Chrysanthemum

  blown to a blood-red Sun.1 Byzantium!

  Praise her, ye slaves and eunuchs! I’ll be dumb.

  To me she only seems one greater hive,

  rotting within while outwardly alive,

  where power corrupts and where the venal thrive;

  where, leeches on the veins of government,

  officials suck men’s blood, till all is spent.

  If that is what by Law and Order’s meant,

  then any empire’s over-lofty crown,

  and vast drilled armies beating neighbours down

  to drag them fettered through New Order’s town,

  to me’s as good a symbol, or as ill,

  of Rule that strangles and of Laws that kill,

  of Man that says his Pride is Heaven’s will.

  O, Buttocks to Caucasia!’

  ‘Tolkien, please!

  What’s biting you? Dog in the Manger’s fleas?

  Let others hear, although you have no mind,

  or have not seen that Lewis has divined

  and has expounded what you dully find

  obscure. See here, some thirty lines you’ve squandered.

  You came to praise our Charles, but now you’ve wandered.

  Much else he wrote that has not yet been pondered.’

  ‘Quite true, alas! But still I’m rather puzzled.

  There’s Taliessin – no, I’ll not be muzzled;

  I’m writing this, not you; I won’t be hustled –

  there’s Taliessin now: I’d always thought

  that in the days of Cymbeline he wrought,2

  ere Rome was Old or New, and that if aught

  is now preserved of what he sang or said,

  ’tis but an echo times have edited

  out of all likeness to his tongue long dead,

  the ancient British, difficult and dark,

  of a minor minstrel in an Outer Mark.

  But here, it seems, a voyage in some swift bark

  to that Black Sea (which now is mainly Red)

  has much enlarged him, both in heart and head;1

  but still I understand not aught he said!

  ‘A truce to this! I never meant to do it,

  thus to reveal my folly. Now I rue it.

  Farewell (for now) beloved druid-poet!2

  Farewell to Logres, Merlin, Nimue,

  Galahad, Arthur! Farewell land and tree

  heavy with fates and portents not for me!

  I must pass by all else you wrote:

  play, preface, life, short verse, review or note

  (rewarded less than worth with grudging groat).

  ‘When your fag is wagging and spectacles are twinkling,

  when tea is brewing or the glasses tinkling,

  then of your meaning often I’ve an inkling,

  your virtues and your wisdom glimpse. Your laugh

  in my heart echoes, when with you I quaff

  the pint that goes down quicker than a half,

  because you’re near. So, heed me not! I swear

  when you with tattered papers take the chair

  and read (for hours maybe), I would be there.

  And ever when in state you sit again

  and to your car imperial give rein,

  I’ll trundle, grumbling, squeaking, in the train

  of the great rolling wheels of
Charles’ Wain.’3

  3

  Thursday evenings

  The Inklings kept no minute-book, so there is no full record of the proceedings during Thursday nights in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen. It might easily have been otherwise, for Warnie Lewis was a good diarist and could have provided a detailed account. ‘I would have played Boswell on those Thursday evenings,’ he said regretfully many years later, ‘but as it is, I am afraid that my diary contains only the scantiest material for reconstructing an Inklings.’

  On the other hand Jack Lewis’s letters to his brother during the first months of the war, when Warnie was serving abroad, do record quite a lot of what went on; while later in the war Tolkien wrote detailed diary-letters to this third son Christopher who was with the R.A.F., and these letters too record something of what happened at the Inklings. So from these, from the diaries that Warnie Lewis kept (they were not, in fact, so very scanty about the Inklings) and from the reminiscences of the people who attended on Thursday nights, it is possible to get some idea of the kind of thing that happened.

  One way to convey the atmosphere of an Inklings evening is to describe an imaginary meeting. What follows is an artificial reconstruction, and entirely imaginary in that it is not based on any one particular evening. On the other hand the subjects of conversation are the kind of things that the Inklings discussed, while the remarks of the various people present are taken from their writings, both published and unpublished, which have been freely adapted to suit the context.1 So while this must not be taken as an accurate record, it may perhaps catch rather more of the flavour of those Thursday evenings than any purely factual account could do. More, but not all; for no reconstruction can do more than hint at what the real thing was like.

  *

  Considering how fine a building they are in, Lewis’s rooms are rather bleak. The effect is as if a school or some other institution had taken over a fine country house, for his plain (and in some cases downright shabby) furniture simply does not come up to the standard of the eighteenth-century panelling, the broad sash windows, and the high ceilings.