The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  When some of Lewis’s teetotal American readers heard of his fondness for drinking beer, and asked him how he could square the consumption of alcohol with his Christianity, they received the reply: ‘I strongly object to the tyrannic and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls itself a Church and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection (that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers), it is so provincial (what I believe you people call ‘small town”).’

  Talking, rather than reading aloud, was the habit at these morning sessions in a pub. ‘The fun is often so fast and furious’, Lewis told Arthur Greeves, ‘that the company probably thinks we’re talking bawdy when in fact we’re very likely talking theology.’

  By the later part of the war the composition of the Inklings had changed a little. The nucleus still consisted of the Lewis brothers, Tolkien, Williams and Havard, together with the rarer visitors Dyson and Barfield; but Coghill and Adam Fox had entirely ceased to attend (Fox had now left Oxford), and Charles Wrenn (who was working in London) only came very rarely to the Thursday meetings. Others stepped in, so to speak, to fill their places, men who never became part of the true inner ring of Lewis’s friends but whose company was generally welcomed by the other Inklings. R. B. McCallum, the History Tutor at Pembroke College and a friend of Tolkien, often came along, though his manner was too formally ‘donnish’ to make him an entirely congenial member of the group. Indeed McCallum was among those who to some extent invited themselves to be Inklings, rather than waiting for the invitation, as was Gervase Mathew, a Catholic priest and academic polymath from Blackfriars, the Oxford house of the Dominicans, situated near the Bird and Baby. This extraordinary man, the brother of Archbishop David Mathew, smoked a continual succession of cigarettes in a nicotine-stained holder and talked in a kind of breathless mutter, speaking at such speed that even Tolkien, until then the champion among the Inklings for haste and inaudibility, was left far behind. Tolkien wrote:

  The Rev. Mathew (Gervase)

  Made inaudible surveys

  Of little-read sages

  In the dark Middle Ages.

  This was entirely true, for Gervase Mathew was an expert on English medieval history; he was also a specialist in Byzantine art and architecture. He was very enthusiastic about Charles Williams’s imaginative use of Byzantium in the Taliessin poems, and he did his best to spread Williams’s fame about Oxford and further afield. He took a particular delight in fact in ‘pulling strings’ and in assisting his friends’ lives in all kinds of ways, a characteristic that made Warnie Lewis once refer to him rather sardonically as ‘the universal Aunt’. As Jack Lewis remarked, ‘he knows everyone and will put you onto the right people (if there are any)’. It was perhaps this desire to be in touch with spheres of influence that made Gervase Mathew seek out the Inklings and virtually elect himself a member; not that he was unwelcome.1

  One or two of Lewis’s other Oxford friends sometimes came to Magdalen on Thursday evenings or drank beer with the Inklings on a weekday morning. One was the shock-headed theological philosopher Donald MacKinnon from Keble College, a Tuesday morning but never a Thursday evening man. Another was Lord David Cecil, then the English Tutor at New College, who was always a most welcome visitor whenever Lewis or Tolkien could persuade him to attend. ‘Visitor’, perhaps, Cecil always remained, for his friendships were too wide-ranging and his literary tastes too broad to make him (so to speak) ‘spiritually an Inkling’. He read aloud to the Inklings from his book Two Quiet Lives which he was then writing, and he was impressed by Williams and attended his lectures. ‘Listening to those oracular imaginings,’ he recalled of them, ‘delivered in that delightfully characteristic voice, one couldn’t help wondering a little whether Blake might have been like that.’

  If Cecil was intrigued by Williams, Williams was almost childishly delighted by making the acquaintance of Cecil. He told his wife to tell a snobbish London neighbour ‘that Lord David Cecil and I are now on Christian name terms! He came into Magdalen last night and in the course of conversation addressed me as Charles and then kind of half-not-apologised, rather sweetly; so I made a suitable answer and proceeded to say in a few minutes “David” – very odd! but he feels I am a husband and a father where the Lewises are not, and we talk of the difficulties of Babies. But he also told the others that his pupils now, when he lays down the law, look up at him and say “I’m not sure that Mr Williams would agree with that”, and he has to say: “O well if Mr W. thinks differently …” and get out of it as best he can.’

  Williams’s mark on the English School was now considerable. He followed his Milton lectures with a course on Wordsworth, and then with another on the eighteenth century. ‘His lectures were crowded out,’ recalled John Wain, who was an undergraduate at St John’s reading English at this time. ‘Even I, who chose to be very supercilious about lectures, seldom missed one.’ Besides the official lectures, Williams gave talks to undergraduate societies. Later, he was asked by a couple of the women’s colleges to give tutorials, and he began to be visited by groups of two or three pupils, whom he sometimes taught in his makeshift bathroom-cum-office at Southfield House. His employer, Sir Humphrey Milford, observed to a colleague that C. W. was now not only using Press time but Press premises for his private work, but merely sighed and said, ‘What can I do?’.

  In the summer of 1943 Williams’s book on Dante and Romantic Theology, The Figure of Beatrice, was published. Tolkien wrote:

  The sales of Charles Williams

  Leapt up by millions,

  When a reviewer surmised

  He was only Lewis disguised.

  This was deliberate nonsense, for the book did not sell vastly and it did not remotely resemble anything Lewis had written. But undoubtedly Lewis’s persistent praise of Williams was having effect, for The Figure of Beatrice began to bring Williams something for which he had waited a long time: public recognition. It would be an exaggeration to say that until now nobody had read his books; the novels had their small but enthusiastic public, and The Descent of the Dove, Williams’s ‘History of the Holy Spirit in the Church’, had brought him enthusiastic letters from unlikely places. ‘I had an extraordinarily moving note from W. H. Auden in America,’ Williams told his wife in the spring of 1940. ‘He said he just wanted to tell me how moved he was by the Dove (and he no Christian) and he was sending me his new book “as a poor return”.’1 But such praise had until now been a rare thing, and the success of The Figure of Beatrice was therefore doubly welcome to Williams.

  Christopher Hollis, reviewing Beatrice in The Tablet, said that it was a book ‘to be read and re-read until it becomes part of the furniture of the mind’. The Oxford theologian Austin Farrer declared himself ‘allured’ by it; Gervase Mathew forthwith lost no time in introducing Williams to Farrer. Indeed Williams found that the book had conferred a true academic respectability upon him, even in Oxford’s cynical eyes. He was invited to a meeting of the august Dante Society, with Father Martin d’Arcy in the chair, where his book was discussed, and a paper was read on it by Lewis’s friend Colin Hardie; and when it was discovered that Williams could not be elected a member because he did not hold a fellowship at any college Maurice Bowra the Warden of Wadham told Williams that he thought it ‘scandalous’ and ‘a condemnation of our whole system’ that no college had offered him a fellowship.

  No fellowship was forthcoming, but early in 1943 the University did award Williams the degree of Honorary Master of Arts. Williams himself remarked to his disciple Raymond Hunt that this was not really because Oxford had recognised his achievement, nor even because Lewis and his friends had arranged it, but simply because the University regularly honoured long-serving employees of the Press at its Oxford headquarters in this fashion; and now that the London branch was in Oxford it was thought courteous to extend the gesture to them. ‘And’, said Williams, ‘it’s obvious that I’m the best pers
on to start on.’ He carried himself with his usual grace and poise at the degree-giving; afterwards, Lewis told him that he had appeared to be ‘the only graduand who seemed to understand what a ceremony was’.

  Not all who read The Figure of Beatrice and were struck by Williams’s exposition of Romantic Theology had themselves read the works of Dante. One such was Dorothy L. Sayers, who had already achieved a reputation as a writer of detective stories and more recently of religious plays: her radio cycle on the life of Christ, The Man Born to he King, had been broadcast with great success by the BBC. She had met Williams before the war, but she began to pay serious attention to him only after spending some hours in his company at the Spaldings’ house in South Parks Road late in 1943 or early in 1944. Anne Spalding remembers: ‘When she arrived, she was very much the successful author, lecturing C. W. on how he ought to get his books into mass circulation by doing this and that with publishers and agents. Twenty-four hours later she was his disciple, sitting at his feet.’ She went away and read The Figure of Beatrice, as she herself said, ‘not because it was about Dante, but because it was by Charles Williams’.

  As for Williams himself, ‘I got in from Magdalen last night about 12 and found her sitting up,’ he told Michal after another of Dorothy Sayers’s visits to South Parks Road. ‘We conversed till 2.15. I like the old dear, but she’s rather heavy going. I should find 2.15 late for one’s dearest friends – but what can one do? She is beginning to think in terms of my Doctrine (Mine? O no!), and consulted me on her deductions.’ A few months later she sent him a thirty-six page letter. ‘She has, under the compulsion of Beatrice,’ Williams told his wife, ‘been reading Dante and Milton, and feels she must write to someone, and to whom but me? Quite a sincere letter; I begin to admire Dorothy seriously as a human being, which I never did before!’

  Dorothy Sayers was also impressed by Lewis’s writings on Christianity, and she wrote to him to say so. ‘She was the first person of importance who ever wrote me a fan-letter,’ he recalled, and he added, ‘I liked her, originally, because she liked me; later, for the extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation – as I like a high wind.’ She did not, however, come to any meetings of the Inklings. No woman ever did. ‘She never met our own club,’ Lewis said, ‘and probably never knew of its existence.’ Indeed the Inklings did not approve of all her work. Lewis and Tolkien greatly admired The Man Born to be King; Lewis said he thought it ‘has edified us in this country more than anything for a long time’. Lewis also considered her Mind of the Maker ‘good on the whole’. But when as a result of this enthusiasm he tried her Oxford detective story Gaudy Night he ‘didn’t like it at all’; while Tolkien, though he liked Dorothy Sayers personally, wrote of it and its hero Lord Peter Wimsey: ‘I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet.’

  Two other writers of some reputation were made thoroughly welcome by the Inklings. One was E. R. Eddison, one of the very few authors of the time whose fiction might be said to have even the faintest resemblance to the stories of Tolkien and Lewis. Tolkien thought Eddison ‘a great writer’ and read everything that he published, though he declared that he disliked Eddison’s ‘peculiarly bad nomenclature and his personal philosophy’. It was not, however, on Tolkien’s recommendation but after seeing it mentioned in a book on the Novel that Lewis read Eddison’s fantasy The Worm Ouroboros in the autumn of 1942. As usual when he was delighted by a book, Lewis wrote to the author. His letter to Eddison was in a pastiche of Middle English, which suited the style of Eddison’s romances, and was also something that Lewis enjoyed doing for its own sake. He declared that the Worm was ‘the most noble and ioyous book I have read these ten years’, far and above better than ‘all the clam jamfrey and whymperinges of the raskellie auctours in these latter daies, as the Eliots, Poundes, Lawrences, Audens, and the like’. He concluded by suggesting that Eddison (who lived in Wiltshire) should visit ‘my poor house and colledge of Sta. Marie Maudlin’ to meet ‘oon or two faste frendes of myne who still, in this duncial age, delight in noble books, that is in straunge adventures, heroicall feates, good maneres, and the report of feyre londes’. They would, he promised, offer him ‘the beste chere and feste we can or mai deuyse’. Eddison replied, also in medieval English, with much enthusiasm; and in February 1943 he came to Oxford and attended a Thursday Inklings, staying the night in his old college, Trinity. He wrote a letter of thanks to Lewis a few days later:

  ‘Certeyn it is, you have given me a memorie to chew upon, as beeves cheweth cudd, beginning with yourself & your brother; your good canarie afore dinner; dinner itself in your great shadowy hall with good & honourable company, good ale & good meats set forth upon shining board; thence to your Common Roome, with puss by the fire & a voidee of fruits & spices; & so to that Quincunciall symposium, at ease about your sea-cole fire, in your privat chaumbre, where (as it seemed to mee) good discourse made night’s horses gallop too faste; & so to our goodnight walke & adieux in the gate under your great Towre. For my self, I tasted wisdome as wel as good ale at your fireside, all be it, I am much afeared, pouring you out on my parte some provokements in exchange. If our talk were battledore & shuttlecock, what matter?’ Twas merry talk, & truth will sometimes appere, better than in statu, in the swift flying to & again of the shuttlecock. So, praying you to convey my duetie to Maister Tolkien & Maister Williams & to yr. worship’s Brother, & in great hope ere many months of our renewed meeting, I rest yr. honour’s most Obedient Humble Servant, E. R. Eddison.’

  There was indeed a renewed meeting between Eddison and the Inklings, in the early summer of 1944. On this occasion Eddison heard Tolkien read aloud from the newly completed Book IV of The Lord of the Rings, and himself read part of his romance The Mezentian Gate, which Tolkien found to be ‘of undiminished power and felicity of expression’. A year later Eddison died, aged sixty-three, leaving this story incomplete.

  A few months after Eddison’s second visit to the Inklings, another and rather less likely person was made welcome by them. On 6 October 1944 Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher: ‘On Tuesday I looked in at the Bird and B. with C. Williams. There to my surprise I found Jack and Warnie already ensconced. (For the present the beer shortage is over, and the inns are almost habitable again.) The conversation was pretty lively – though I cannot remember any of it now except C. S. L.’s story of an elderly lady that he knows. (She was a student of English in the past days of Sir Walter Raleigh.1 At her viva she was asked: “What period would you have liked to live in, Miss B?” “In the fifteenth century,” said she. “Oh come Miss B., wouldn’t you have liked to meet the Lake poets?” “No, sir, I prefer the society of gentlemen.” Collapse of viva.) – and I noticed a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose, sitting in the corner. The others had their backs to him, but I could see in his eye that he was taking an interest in the conversation quite unlike the ordinary pained astonishment of the British (and American) public at the presence of the Lewises (and myself) in a pub. It was rather like Trotter at the Prancing Pony, v. like in fact. All of a sudden he butted in, in a strange unplaceable accent, taking up some point about Wordsworth. In a few seconds he was revealed as Roy Campbell (of Flowering Rifle and Flaming Terrapin). Tableau! Especially as C. S. L. had not long ago violently lampooned him in the Oxford Magazine, and his press-cutters miss nothing. After that things became fast and furious and I was late for lunch. It was (perhaps) gratifying to find that this powerful poet and soldier desired in Oxford chiefly to see Lewis (and myself). We made an appointment for Thursday night.’

  Roy Campbell, born in South Africa in 1901, had been a professional jouster and bullfighter in Provence. After establishing his reputation as a poet in the twenties, he fought on the side of Franco’s right-wing forces in the Spanish Civil War. Now that he was in
Oxford, Father Martin d’Arcy had told him to search out Lewis and company in the Bird and Baby.

  When the Inklings met on the Thursday night with Campbell as their guest, there was a division of opinion which revealed a deep-seated difference between Lewis and Tolkien. Both men were strongly conservative in their politics, but Lewis believed in the democratic control of power while Tolkien did not. ‘I am a democrat,’ Lewis once said, ‘because I believe in the Fall and therefore think men too wicked to be trusted with more than the minimum power over other men.’ Tolkien declared: ‘I am not a “democrat”, if only because “humility” and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride.’ Lewis and Tolkien both feared the rise of Communism and the growing power of the Left; they also hated and feared the growth of fascism in pre-war Britain – Lewis included Blackshirts among the forces of intellectual evil in The Pilgrim’s Regress – as well as sharing their countrymen’s enmity to Hitler and Mussolini. But during the Spanish Civil War, Tolkien largely sympathised with Franco’s cause in Spain, not because he approved of fascism but because he saw Franco as the defender of the Catholic Church against Communist persecution. Roy Campbell had not only fought on Franco’s side but had become a Catholic in the process, so that Tolkien had a large area of agreement with him. Lewis on the other hand declared fervently: ‘I loathed and loathe Roy Campbell’s particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism, and told him so.’ Observing this, Tolkien suspected that it was not the Fascism which Lewis hated about Campbell so much as the Catholicism. He reported to his son Christopher that on the Thursday night Lewis, who (he said) ‘had taken a fair deal of port and was a little belligerent’, insisted on reading his lampoon to Campbell, and that after listening to Campbell’s stories of Communist outrages against Catholic clergy in Spain, Lewis’s ‘reactions were odd’. Tolkien continued: ‘If a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered – he disbelieves it, and I daresay really thinks they asked for it. There is a good deal of Ulster still left in C. S. L., if hidden from himself.’