The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (54 page)

He suspected that death was near. “I am, I think, somehow and obscurely warned,” he told Alice, and quoted Wordsworth to the effect that every effort comes “with a weight / Heavy as frost and deep almost as life.” He arranged for Fr. Gervase Mathew to celebrate a Catholic Mass at Blackfriars Hall in St. Giles’, Oxford, “for anyone I have ever loved in any way”—a most unusual request from a devout Anglican, and one with overtones of farewell. In early February, Eliot asked him when the Arthurian book might be ready. Not soon, for, as Williams told Florence, he had made little headway, producing “3000 words … out of 90,000.” Such a huge project was beyond him now. He could still write letters, though, and those to his wife during the late winter and early spring of 1945 overflow with tenderness: “I do love you. I also badly need you”; “Bless you for everything. I love you”; “O sweet, to what a labour you committed us both when you first admired the
Silver Stair
 … you have always been the first and great Influence.”

All the while, great events shook the world. In February, Allied leaders met in Yalta to divide up the postwar world. In April, Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage, Mussolini was slaughtered by Italian partisans, Hitler committed suicide, and the Reichstag fell to Allied troops. Williams exulted in the Axis defeat: “I am very glad the fighting has been so heavy in Berlin; and may it be fifty years before it’s built again.” He praised Florence extravagantly for her part in the war effort: “They’ve failed; they’ve been broken. And you—especially—have helped to do it. Victory depended on you.” The triumph seemed to rejuvenate him, and new projects bubbled up. He told Florence that he had in him “one more novel, which my faithful public will not like … There will be no black magic, no dancing figures, and no supernatural beings wandering through its pages.” To Father Mathew, he described a projected
Life of Jesus
, eliciting from him the quip, as Williams relayed it to Florence, that the project would be “quite simple: all I had to do was to have the 4th Gospel typed out & sent it in as mine,” for “nothing was a more exact C.W. style than ‘In the beginning was the Word.’” This was, for Williams, absolutely true; from his earliest days the Word and words, lyrical, magical, and mystical, had meant all to him. But now silence descended. On May 8, he wrote Florence that “it’s very quiet & silent now. It’s also pouring with rain. I’m sitting on the balcony alone in the house … The mourning & the burying are done … it is nice to be done.”

Compiling a list of new projects proved to be his final creative act. On May 10, the same day that Tolkien was hosting an “A.R.P. R.I.P.” (“Air Raid Precautions Rest in Peace”) victory party for fellow air wardens at his Northmoor Road home, Williams doubled over with pain. Florence was contacted and rushed up from London to escort her husband to the Radcliffe Infirmary. On May 14, he underwent surgery. The next morning, John Wain, who had become a devotee of Williams’s lectures, was on his way to class when

a girl I knew by sight came pedaling fast and agitatedly on her bicycle round the corner from New College Lane. “John,” she called out, “Charles Williams is dead.” She had never spoken to me before, and normally would have avoided using my Christian name. But this was a general disaster, like an air-raid, and the touch of comradeliness was right. I asked her for details, but she knew nothing except that he was dead. In any case, she could not talk; she was only just not crying.

I walked on towards St. John’s. The war with Germany was over. Charles Williams was dead. And suddenly Oxford was a different place. There was still much to enjoy, much to love and hate, much to get used to; but the war-time Oxford of my undergraduate days had disappeared. Its pulse had stopped with the pulse of Williams.

Warnie was at his desk at Magdalen when the news arrived:

At 12.50 this morning I had just finished work on the details of the Boisleve family, when the telephone rang, and a woman’s voice asked if I would take a message for J—“Mr. Charles Williams died in the Acland this morning.” One often reads of people being “stunned” by bad news, and reflects idly on the absurdity of the expression; but there is more than a little truth in it. I felt just as if I had slipped and come down on my head on the pavement.

Distraught, he rushed out for a consoling drink, “choosing unfortunately the King’s Arms, where during the winter Charles and I more than once drank a pint after leaving Tollers at the Mitre.” Writing in his journal later the same day, he wept over the death of this man he much admired, lamenting that “there will be no more pints with Charles: no more ‘Bird and Baby’: the blackout has fallen, and the Inklings can never be the same again … I hear his voice as I write, and can see his thin form in his blue suit, opening his cigarette box with trembling hands … so vanishes one of the best and nicest men it has ever been my good fortune to meet. May God receive him into His everlasting happiness.”

Soon other Inklings learned of Williams’s passing. Tolkien immediately wrote a letter to Florence: “I share a little in your loss, for in the (far too brief) years since I first met him I had grown to admire and love your husband deeply, and I am more grieved than I can express.” That Tolkien ever loved Williams deeply, or at all, is doubtful, and his words are best read as an appropriate condolence to a new widow. He was utterly sincere, however, in adding that “I shall have you all in my prayers immediately and continually.” He arranged for Father Mathew to celebrate a Mass for the repose of Williams’s soul on the following Saturday, at which he participated as altar server.

But it was Lewis who felt most keenly the blow of Williams’s death, and who dramatized the loss most strikingly. While Warnie and Tolkien situated their friend’s death in a conventional religious frame, Lewis cast it as a great discovery of hitherto unrealized truths, almost a holy revelation, experienced not only by himself but by his entire circle. He had dropped by the Acland on May 15, planning to lend Williams a book and cheer him up, but instead had learned of his death, news he had anticipated “as little (almost) as I expected to die that day myself.” It was a Tuesday, and the Inklings were gathering at the Eagle and Child. Lewis hurried over, noticing en route that “the very streets looked different,” and presented the grim news to his astonished colleagues: “I had some difficulty in making them believe or even understand what had happened. The world seemed to us at that moment primarily a
strange
one.” This sense of strangeness continued long afterward. For Lewis it never went away, for Williams’s death confirmed for him and the others the reality of eternal life:

We now verified for ourselves what so many bereaved people have reported; the ubiquitous presence of a dead man, as if he had ceased to meet us in particular places in order to meet us everywhere. It is not in the least like a haunting. It is not in the least like the bitter-sweet experiences of memory. It is vital and bracing; it is even, however the word may be misunderstood and derided, exciting … No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed.

In a letter to Florence written soon after the event, Lewis underscored the transformative effect of her husband’s death: “I believe in the next life ten times more strongly than I did. At moments it seems quite tangible. Mr. Dyson, on the day of the funeral, summed up what many of us felt, ‘It is not blasphemous,’ he said, ‘to believe that what was true of Our Lord is, in its less degree, true of all who are in Him. They go away in order to be
with
us in a new way, even closer than before.’ A month ago I would have called this silly sentiment. Now I know better.”

The Ranks Expand

These subtle perceptions notwithstanding, it was the acute reality of Williams’s absence that claimed attention when the Inklings next convened, the unavoidable gap in the circle, the void once filled by that antic energy, that puckish, dead-serious mind that reeled off ancient poetry and new ideas with a rapidity and accuracy that only Lewis could match, that brought to each gathering goodwill, comradeship, and an earnest intelligence that rarely outran its expressive skills. As Warnie said, “The Inklings [would] never be the same.” And yet Wain’s claim that “the group had begun to spiral downwards from the time Williams died; one after another, people fell away…” overstates the case. Williams had been a brilliant addition to the group, but only for a while had his personality dominated. He was irreplaceable, not indispensable. Lewis and Tolkien continued to hold the center; the Inklings had met before Williams arrived and continued to meet after he departed.

In addition to the familiar crew—Lewis, Warnie, Tolkien, Dyson, Havard—new figures swelled the ranks in the years just before and after Williams’s death. These novices chimed in with a splendid variety of voices. Wain, a budding poet and critic and a future biographer, playwright, and novelist, seemed promising but proved a lukewarm Christian and disliked fantasy, arguing that “a writer’s task … was to lay bare the human heart, and this could not be done if he were continually taking refuge in the spinning of fanciful webs.” He never became a full-blooded member. Steadier participation came from young Christopher Tolkien, who in late 1945, although only twenty, was invited by his father, with the group’s hearty approval, to join as “a
permanent member
, with right of entry and what not quite independent of my presence or otherwise.” He reentered Trinity College, Oxford, to complete his degree, reading English under Lewis, and became an active Inkling. Christopher was an ideal recruit, gentle, well-spoken, intelligent, likable, and especially close to his father. From early boyhood, he had loved his father’s writings and had obsessed, like his father, over textual inaccuracies and contradictions; Michael recalled him exclaiming, at the age of four or five, “Last time,
you
said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and
you
said Thorin had a golden tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver.” Years later, in South Africa during the war, Christopher had performed a similarly eagle-eyed service, not only critiquing installments of
The Lord of the Rings
but drawing maps and making fair copies. With his clear, melodious voice, a welcome contrast to his father’s hopeless mumbling, he now became the official reader of the elder Tolkien’s work, to everyone’s satisfaction.

The group also enjoyed an influx of Roman Catholic members. It is unclear when Father Gervase Mathew (Gervase was his religious name; his birth name was Anthony) joined, but by the time of Williams’s death, this Dominican priest, theologian, and lecturer in Byzantine history had become a valued member, much liked for his gentleness and air of distracted dowdiness; Warnie dubbed him “the universal aunt.” The Lewis brothers admired Mathew’s scholarship, although Lewis ribbed his work in a clerihew (a four-line ditty, invented by the novelist Edmund Clerihew Bentley and much in vogue among English Christians during the first half of the twentieth century):

Father Gervase

Makes inaudible surveys

On little-known sages

Of the Middle Ages

The more ardently Protestant Inklings refrained from sniping at Mathew, perhaps in deference to his priestly office. But they were not always so ecumenically serene. Lewis’s difficulties with Catholicism have been detailed above; Warnie, equally unsettled by a Roman collar, proclaimed that “there has always been something sinister, a little repulsive, almost ogreish, about the practice of the R.C. religion.” He never let his ingrained bias stand in the way of friendship, however. When the medievalist J.A.W. Bennett attended his first meeting at Tolkien’s invitation, on August 15, 1946, Warnie wrote in his diary of his “dismay” at Bennett’s presence, both because he was a “dull dog” and because he was “an R.C.” Warnie’s objection, in this case, was not so much because he disliked Catholics per se, but because he worried about Hugo Dyson’s reaction to Bennett’s faith. As it happens, he was wrong about Bennett, who would not become a Catholic for some years, but he was right about Dyson. The latter was continually irked by Tolkien’s religion and had threatened more than once to quit the Inklings if any more Catholics joined. It may be that his disdain for
The Lord of the Rings
, which grew pronounced as the years passed, originated in animosity (conscious or not) to its Catholic undercurrents. Notwithstanding Warnie’s edginess and Dyson’s bias, however, Bennett fit in nicely, becoming a regular and well-liked member of the group.

Another new member was Commander James Harold Dundas-Grant, a Catholic of Scottish descent, who first encountered one of the Inklings in Magdalen’s Senior Common Room in October 1944, while billeted at the college as head of the University Naval Division:

At the far side of the table, I saw a baldish head deeply ensconced in
Punch
, so I helped myself to porridge, picked up
The Times
, and sat down. There was a rustle of
Punch
, and I found a pair of merry, friendly eyes looking at me. “I say,” then in a whisper, “do you talk at breakfast?” “By training, no; by nature, yes,” I replied. Down went
Punch
. “Oh good,” he said. “I’m Lewis.” “Not ‘Screwtape’?” I blurted out. “I’m afraid so; yes” … There was a step outside; the door was flung open; a tall, gaunt figure stalked in. Up went
Punch
; up went
The Times
. We ate in silence.

Soon after that morning encounter, Dundas-Grant asked Lewis to accept him and four fellow officers as informal tutees in philosophy. Lewis instantly responded, “I’m your man,” delighted at the chance to teach mature students (Dundas-Grant was nearly fifty at the time). A rigorous course of weekly compositions and meetings started up. “He couldn’t have taken more trouble with us,” Dundas-Grant remembered, “had we been graduates reading for a doctorate. True, he tore our essays to pieces but so gently that he could put the pieces together again in proper form and solve the argument. The great thing was he made us
think
.” A bit later, Lewis invited him to a ham dinner, a rarity during this time of rations. There Dundas-Grant met Tolkien, “tall, sweptback grey hair, restless,” along with Warnie, Hardie, and Havard. He soon found himself at other gatherings with his new friends, enjoying the company but rarely chiming in, for “it was at these sessions that I found out how much one learned just sitting and listening.” Lewis admired Dundas-Grant’s unfeigned humility, and after the war, at about the time that Dundas-Grant and his wife converted a house on the Iffley Road into a residence for Catholic undergraduates, Lewis invited him to attend Tuesday morning meetings at the Bird and Baby. There “acquaintance turned to friendship … We sat in a small back room with a fine coal fire in winter. Back and forth the conversation would flow. Latin tags flying around. Homer quoted in the original to make a point. And Tolkien, jumping up and down, declaiming in Anglo-Saxon.”