PREFACE
C. S. Lewis died in 1963, J. R. R. Tolkien in 1973, Charles Williams in 1945. In recent years the books of the first two have been immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, while Williams, though his name is far less well known, continues to exercise a considerable fascination to those who have encountered his writings.
These three men knew each other well. Lewis and Tolkien met in 1926 and soon achieved an intimacy which lasted for many years. Around them gathered a group of friends, many of them Oxford dons, who referred to themselves informally and half jestingly as ‘The Inklings’. When in 1939 Charles Williams found himself obliged to move from London to Oxford he was quickly taken into this circle, and was on close terms with Lewis and the others until his death.
The Inklings achieved a certain fame – or even notoriety, for they had their detractors – during the lifetime of the group. And when some years later it was noted that The Lord of the Rings, The Screwtape Letters, and All Hallows’ Eve (to name but three of many books) had this in common, that they were first read aloud to the Inklings, it became something of a fashion to study the writings of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams on the assumption that they were members of a clearly defined literary group with a common aim. Such an assumption may or may not stand up to serious investigation. But in the meanwhile there has been no attempt to write any collective biography of the Inklings. This book tries to fill that gap.
It is based largely on unpublished material, and I am much in the debt of the various people who have made this material available to me. My acknowledgements to them and to the many others who have helped me will be found in Appendix D. As to quotations, their sources are fully identified in Appendix C, by a system which I feel is less intrusive than the conventional method of numerals referring to notes.
The book is largely concerned with C. S. Lewis; for, as I have argued in it, the Inklings owed their existence as a group almost entirely to him. I have also given an account, necessarily highly compressed, of the life and writings of Charles Williams. Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s life and work outside the Inklings I have said very little, because he has been the subject of an earlier book of mine, to which I have little to add.
I have tried to show the ways in which the ideas and interests of the Inklings contrasted sharply with the general intellectual and literary spirit of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. This has necessitated some discussion of their writings, particularly Lewis’s. In this sense the book sometimes strays from ‘pure’ biography into literary criticism. But I have deliberately avoided making any general judgement of these men’s achievement, for I think it is too early to try to do so. I have merely tried to tell their story.
H.C.
Oxford, 1978.
‘O my heart, it is all a very odd life.’
Charles Williams in a letter to his wife, 12 March 1940
‘Oh for the people who speak one’s own language’
From the nursery window of the big house there could be seen a line of long, low mountains. Often the view was blurred by a slight mist, for the weather was generally damp, and on many days the sight of the hills was shut out entirely by slanting rain. Then, all that the boy could see were the wet fields that sloped down towards Belfast, where the tall cranes marked the shipyards whose hum could be heard even at this distance.
Even on wet days there was plenty to be done. Outside the nursery door were long upstairs corridors, attics to be explored, games to be played among the gurgling water-tanks where the wind blew under the slates. Or if the boy tired of that, there were pictures to be drawn and stories to be invented, and his diary of the holiday to be written up.
‘My Life during the Exmas Holydays of 1907, by Jacks or Clive Lewis. Author of “Building of the promenad”, “Toyland”, “Living races of mouse-land” etc. I begin my life after my 9th birthday. On which I got a book from Papy and a post card album from Mamy. Warnie (my brother) was coming home and I was looking forward to him and the Xmas holydays.’
The boy had been christened Clive, but he always called himself Jacks or Jack. His brother Warnie, whose real name was Warren, was three years older than him, and went to a boarding-school in England. Jack always looked forward to Warnie’s return, because then they could paint pictures together or make up stories. Warnie liked stories about steamships and trains and India, while Jack liked to write about animals who did heroic deeds. But they usually managed to fit all this into the same story. While Warnie was away at school, Jack carried on with the stories by himself, when he was not learning things from Miss Harper, his governess, or from his mother, who taught him French and Latin.
‘Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her cheif industry etc. etc. Papy of course is the master of the house, and a man in whom you can see strong Lewis features, bad temper, very sensible, nice wen not in a temper. I am like most boys of 9 and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin, and generaly weraing a jersey.’
His father, who worked as a solicitor in Belfast, was changeable in mood, and Jack felt more comfortable with his mother, who behaved in the same calm affectionate way all the time. On the other hand it was his father who had bought all the hundreds of books which lined the study and the drawing-room and the cloakroom, and were stacked two deep in the landing bookcase, and filled the corridors and the bedrooms. Jack turned the pages of most of them in turn. One day he found these lines in a book of poetry by Longfellow:
I heard a voice that cried
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, dead.
He had never heard of Balder, but the words gave him an extraordinary feeling, a notion of great cold expanses of northern sky. He could not understand exactly what he felt, and the more he tried to recapture the feeling the more it slipped away.
There were lots of other books to read: the Beatrix Potter tales, Gulliver’s Travels in a big illustrated volume, and stories by Conan Doyle and Mark Twain and E. Nesbit. In the summer there were picnics on the hills and days by the sea, and there was always something to be done in the big house; so that the time passed quickly in a steady humdrum happiness.
Then one night not very long after his ninth birthday he woke with a headache, and when he cried, his mother did not come to him. There were lights in her room and a bustle of doctors and nurses. She had cancer. Jack prayed that God would make her better, but she went on being ill. On the day she died, the calendar in her room (which had a Shakespearian quotation for each day) bore the words: Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. After that, everything changed. Jack would still have moments of happiness, but the old unshakeable comfort had gone. As he himself said, ‘It was sea and islands now. The great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’
First came the discomfort of being crammed into Eton collar, knickerbockers and bowler hat; then the clop clop of the four-wheeler driving him and his brother to the quay in Belfast; then the sea crossing, followed by his first sight of England, which seemed a sadly flat landscape after the Irish hills; then school.
Wynyard School in Hertfordshire had been moderately
