The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (35 page)

Life at the Kilns

It was good to have Warnie at hand, thought Lewis. The two brothers worked in Lewis’s Magdalen digs on weekdays, heading to the Kilns every afternoon and on weekends. Once home, they gardened, housecleaned, walked the dogs, and undertook maintenance and improvement projects such as laying gravel-and-sand footpaths through the woods. Barfield and Tolkien came for visits. Warnie edited the family papers and began to study the reign of Louis XIV, a project that would bear fruit in seven acclaimed volumes of French social and political history. He also struck up a friendship with Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Maureen. She was teaching music now, first at Monmouth School for Girls and then at Oxford High School, and she gladly began to teach Warnie how to play piano. He regaled her in turn with recordings on his new gramophone. Every so often the brothers traveled afield, visiting relatives in Scotland and going on walking tours in Herefordshire, Wales, the Chilterns, and Derbyshire. Warnie proved to have an eye for landscape: “In the afternoon J and I and the dogs did the Railway walk under conditions which were sheer delight. Everything was still, and a faint blue haze, the merest suggestion of a fog, softened all the colours to a compatible shabbiness—the sort of day when the country seems more intimate, more in undress, than at any other time.”

The fly in the ointment was Mrs. Moore. She groused, her complaints often targeting Lewis’s new Christian faith (the Eucharist, for example, she considered no more than a “blood feast”) “in much the same way,” remarked Warnie, “that P [Pudaitabird] used to nag me in his latter years about my boyish fondness for dress, and with apparently just the same inability to grasp the fact that the development of the mind does not necessarily stop with that of the body.” Warnie developed for her a fierce dislike, which he kept under wraps as best he could until after Lewis’s death. As soon as fear of offending his brother was no longer a consideration, he published a memoir blasting Mrs. Moore as “a woman of very limited mind … In twenty years I never saw a book in her hands; her conversation was chiefly about herself, and was otherwise a matter of ill-informed dogmatism.” She treated Lewis, he fumed, like a hired servant. Others spoke up in her defense, however, notably Barfield, who condemned Warnie’s “false picture” of her as a “baneful stepmother and inexorable taskmistress” and said that to his knowledge the Kilns harbored “a normal and reasonably happy family life.”

Some light may be shed on this vexing, almost indecipherable relationship, by Lewis’s 1948 essay, “The Trouble with ‘X’…,” which seems to contain a veiled—if possibly exaggerated for pedagogical effect—description of Mrs. Moore (as “X”) and may suggest why the relationship lasted until her death:

An outside friend asks us why we are looking so glum, and the truth comes out.

On such occasions the outside friend usually says, “But why don’t you tell them? Why don’t you go to your wife (or husband, or father, or daughter, or boss, or landlady, or lodger) and have it all out? People are usually reasonable…” And we, whatever we say outwardly, think sadly to ourselves, “He doesn’t know ‘X.’” We do. We know how utterly hopeless it is to make “X” see reason … You know, in fact, that any attempt to talk things over with “X” will shipwreck on the old, fatal flaw in “X”’s character. And you see, looking back, how all the plans you have ever made always have shipwrecked on that fatal flaw—on “X”’s incurable jealousy, or laziness, or touchiness, or muddle-headedness, or bossiness, or ill temper, or changeableness. Up to a certain age you have perhaps had the illusion that some external stroke of good fortune—an improvement in health, a rise of salary, the end of the war—would solve your difficulty. But you know better now …

A Christian’s duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate “X” but to make life with “X” an occasion to work on one’s own character flaws. This was the arduous task he assigned himself, and through intense self-discipline, he largely succeeded. His newfound Christianity fit him perfectly, providing him with a sturdy and subtle guide for daily living. In addition, it gave him what he had always needed, a rock-solid platform from which to declaim his philosophy and hone his art. He was now ready to convert the world.

10

ROMANTIC THEOLOGY

Charles Williams was not like other Inklings. Lewis and Tolkien were solid, jocular, beef-and-potatoes men, and even Barfield, for all his dancing and esoteric flights, was practical and predictable, at home, if not fulfilled, in law and real estate. Williams was a will-o’-the-wisp, a figure glimpsed in a fever dream. To attempt his portrait is to paint on air: “Williams! How many people have tried to describe this extraordinary man, and how his essence escapes them.” Thus John Wain, who knew him well. Or Lewis, an intimate friend: “No man whom I have known was at the same time less affected and more flamboyant in his manners. The thing is very difficult to describe.” Or T. S. Eliot: “I think he was a man of unusual genius, and I regard his work as important. But it has an importance of a kind not easy to describe.” Three of the more articulate men of the century, tongue-tied—when it comes to Williams.

How can this be? A few answers come to mind. Above all, Williams was a swirling mass of contradictions. He wrote shockers that failed to shock. He worshipped women but “liked to beat them with a ruler.” He was a faithful husband with a harem of besotted acolytes. He was orthodox but heretical, a devout Anglican who practiced magic. He had a face at once hideous and beautiful (Lewis: “His face we thought ugly: I am not sure that the word ‘monkey’ has not been murmured in this context. But the moment he spoke it became, as was also said, like the face of an angel.”). “This double-sidedness,” Lewis believed, “was the most strongly developed character of his mind. He might have appropriated Kipling’s thanks

to Allah who gave me two

separate sides to my head,

except that he would have had to omit the word
separate
 … In Williams the two sides lived in a perpetual dance or lovers’ quarrel of mutual mockery.”

In addition, Williams liked—or felt compelled—to construct imaginary personae for himself and those around him. He called himself Taliesin, after the sixth-century Welsh bard; his wife, Florence, he renamed Michal, after King Saul’s daughter and King David’s first wife; among his female admirers and platonic lovers, he transformed Phyllis Jones into Phillida and Celia, Lois Lang-Sims into Lalage; and he referred to his distinguished superior at Oxford University Press, Sir Humphrey Milford, as Caesar. Indeed, once he joined OUP, it wasn’t long before he had turned that booming international firm into a province of his own imperial imagination. Away from work, his friends were more than friends; they and he formed a mystical community, the “Companions of the Co-inherence” (a key Williamsian idea, co-inherence is the mutual relatedness of all beings; we exist, not as isolated monads, but in and through one another). For Williams, who adored Shakespeare, the world was indeed a stage, an occasion for role-playing, for theater, and for the highest form of theater, which is religious ritual. “He was nothing if not a ritualist,” said Lewis. He would make sacred signs, such as the Sign of the Cross, over his followers as they rode the London Underground; he had a taste for sadomasochistic rituals as well. Ordinary life—the dull daily routines of marriage, of office work, of an evening’s amusement—all this bored him, even filled him with horror. Everyone and everything, with Williams, needed to be raised to its highest level—the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the laborer a hero in a sacred drama—intensified, reified, baptized in the turbulent waters of his restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.

At his best, he could almost raise the dead; Dylan Thomas once said to him, “Why, you come into the room and talk about Keats and Blake as if they were
alive
.” This impression he gave of electric animation, of a bundle of raw nerves in a business suit, spewing ideas, images, observations in all directions, appears in many accounts of Williams. Typical is that of Theodore Maynard, a poetry reviewer for the
North American Review
, who visited him in London in 1919 and discovered a man “trembling with nervousness” and chattering away with “staccato eagerness.” Eliot, who knew Williams and admired him, watched him lecture and saw the same thing: “He was never still; he writhed and swayed; he jingled coins in his pocket; he sat on the edge of the table swinging his leg; in a torrent of speech he appeared to be saying whatever came into his head from one moment to the next.” He smoked heavily, walked quickly, zigzagged from one friendship to another; he was monkey, elf, jackdaw rolled into one.

This wondrously strange man came into the world on September 20, 1886, in the pedestrian community of Holloway, a lower-middle-class suburb just north of central London. The family resided at 3 Spencer Road, a nondescript lane of narrow brick homes overshadowed by a huge iron railroad bridge. Williams’s father, Walter (Richard Walter Stansby Williams), a foreign business correspondent who worked in the city, never earned enough to make ends meet and poured out his sorrows in mournful poetry that appeared now and then in local journals (“I go to my daily work again / With a feeling of longing akin to pain / The heart beats high in this wearisome life”). His mother, Mary, was resourceful and quiet, seemingly content to be a mother and housewife.

This bland environment, which offered little beyond lounging in front of the coal fire and watching the soot darken the windows, thrust Williams, at an early age, inside himself. He turned to books as bright companions, avenues of escape; like Lewis and Tolkien, he read avidly in romance and adventure, with a liking for Jules Verne and
The Pilgrim’s Progress.
As the taste for Bunyan might suggest, his other outlet was the church. His parents, devout Anglicans, recited evening prayers on a daily basis and attended services on Sunday at St. Anne’s, a cavernous Victorian-era red-brick church with a high vaulted roof. “He used to march into church as if he owned the place,” reported his mother; the church, in turn, marched into his heart. Williams never abandoned Anglicanism; he pushed at its borders, cut occult symbols in its altar cloths, called upon powers that would have amazed the seventeenth-century divines, but remained within the fold. How could he not? He adored the music, the adornments, all aspects of the liturgy; it provided the color and sparkle, and, as he grew a bit older, the meaning and direction that suburban routine lacked. He had tantrums when the family stayed home from services.

When Williams was five, he contracted measles and his eyesight deteriorated; distant objects became a blur. He liked to check the time on a certain public clock; now the clock itself disappeared into the myopic fog. Three years later, his father’s sight fell victim to a similar problem; Williams considered it the family malady and called it “the asps of blindness.” Compounding the crisis, Walter’s company went bankrupt. The family was at a loss, until Mary’s ingenuity and courage sprang to life. She withdrew her savings and, with her son, her young daughter, Edith (b. 1889), and her half-blind husband in tow, fled to St. Albans, a tranquil village in Hertfordshire, in the hope that clean country air would restore her husband’s vision or at least prevent further decay. She secured lodgings, set up a household, and opened, in the center of town, a stationery and art shop that she called the Art Depot. This was the new world in which Williams would come to maturity.

St. Albans had much to offer: clean streets, friendly neighbors, nearby woods, bits of Roman ruins, and, a godsend to Charles, a medieval abbey with a cathedral church, the second longest in England, with Norman and Gothic arches, a crossing tower, and the tombs of abbots and saints. Here Williams’s religious and romantic longings flowered. His reading expanded to include the adventures of Anthony Hope and Alexandre Dumas and books on knights and chivalry, along with more sobering work like
The Scarlet Letter.
He attended Matins and Evensong on Sundays and, after being confirmed at fifteen, frequently received the Eucharist, although never at a Tolkienesque pace. His imagination, however, attained a Lewisian pitch, but instead of the animal fantasies of Boxen, he and a friend by the name of George Robinson spun elaborate theatrics, “a sort of running drama” inspired by
The Prisoner of Zenda
. He and George attended St. Albans Grammar School, adjacent to the Abbey, a venerable public school founded in 948 that counted among its alumni the only English pope, Adrian IV (c. 1100–59). Here, heightening his growing interest in history, Williams performed in class pageants based upon St. Albans’s medieval past. “Most of the boys tolerated the whole affair, some loathed it but Charles … loved it,” remembered George. One gets the sense of an antiquarian in the making: nearsighted, devouring tales of derring-do, seeking exultation in distant times and places. Like other boys who live in the past or in their minds, he abhorred sports. He had, in addition to bad eyesight, a second disability: his hands shook, often uncontrollably, a lifelong affliction brought on by childhood measles or family tensions—the shop never brought in quite enough money—or by the storms that rage in every adolescent and that, in Williams, found no outlet; the tremors left him unable to take up a musical instrument, or shoot or fish, or indulge in other boyish hobbies. Instead, he passed his spare time dreaming, reading, and writing poetry. He might have ended up a narrow-minded scholar or a timid dreamer, in retreat from life, but for the influence of his nearly blind father. For Walter, largely unfit for work, began to take his boy on long country rambles, sometimes twenty miles at a time, while discoursing about poetry, language, art, and faith, imparting, as Williams put it in a poem, “all the good I knew.” The father was able finally to be the father, and the son soaked in his lessons, including a love of walking that never left him.

His childhood over, Williams walked, myopically, into adulthood. Lacking clear ambitions, he enrolled in University College London, commuting daily between St. Albans and St. Pancras, taking courses in French, Latin, mathematics, and literature. After two years the family coffers emptied, and he left to attempt the civil service exam. Through lack of caring or lack of preparation—certainly not lack of intelligence—he failed. Boxed into a corner, he took a job as a packer at the Methodist Bookroom, a dead-end position, but at the same time showed the good sense to enroll in the Working Men’s College. Here he befriended Fred Page, editor at the London offices of Oxford University Press, who was preparing for publication a seventeen-volume edition of Thackeray. Page knew thwarted intelligence when he saw it, recognized that his new friend was wasted as a packer, and offered him a job. On June 9, 1908, Williams went to work in the “Paper, Printing, and Proof-Reading” department of OUP at Amen Corner—later Amen House—in Paternoster Row.