Review of ‘Charles Williams: The Third Inkling’ by Grevel Lindop for the Temenos Review

An introduction to Charles Williams

In the future I hope to write more about the novels of Charles Williams, the lesser known of the Inklings. I wrote the following Review of Grevel Lindop’s biography of Williams some years ago and it was published in the Temenos Academy Review. It is a good introduction. I hope you enjoy it.

‘Suffering’ is a word used to express so many kinds of experience that its precision of meaning has been lost. The Latin verb feere means ‘to bear’, ‘to carry’ and ‘suffer’, which derives from it with the prefix ‘sub’ meaning ‘under’. Charles Williams’ life, as presented in Grevel Lindop’s ‘Charles Williams – The Third Inkling’, was a life under subtle suffering. Williams is not a man of action, but someone whose inner world is more real and sensitive than his apprehension of external reality.

The original advertised title of the book was ‘Charles Williams -England’s Last Magician’, but on publication this was changed to ‘The Third Inkling.’ For commercial reasons, William’s connection to that lose group of scholars which centred on those notably great Oxford Dons C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien is understandable, especially as they went on to such popular acclaim. Yet it is the original title that is resonant for me, as I explain in this review.

William’s is another of those ‘time-torn’ men who traverse the nineteenth and the twentieth century; in literary history terms, this makes William’s of particular interest. In the early chapters, the author explores William’s origins and the family dynamics that shape his life to come.

William’s life and literary fortunes are compared to T.S. Eliot, whose life his own life parallels; both are in many ways similar: both are literary, both are poets, and both work in the field of publishing. They are also both extremely sensitive and complex individuals, but with his work The Wasteland, Elliot’s modernist epic heralded the birth of a new world that Williams could never really enter, or fully understand. Elliot is, of course successful and lauded by the literary establishment, whilst Williams’ fortunes are less positive. The middle section of Lindop’s book captures this sense of Williams being at odds with the twentieth century; he is a man connecting always with internal realities and archetypal energies of the subtle inner worlds. He is also traditionally British in his sensibility, whereas Elliot, with his American birth and European outlook towards imagism and the influence of Ezra Pound, creates something vital and new, capturing the zeitgeist of the times.

Grevel Lindop has a great love of Charles Williams, and this is clear from each carefully researched chapter. William’s external life and the roots of his suffering are created by two linked circumstances: the poor material circumstances of his birth that meant he was unable to attend University, and his marriage to someone above him in social status, but below him in intellect. His torn emotional state of loyalty to his wife and troubled son, and his platonic desire for other women, is a constant conflict throughout this biography.

In the second half of the book, Lindop captures the day-to-day passage of William’s life. His fellow Inklings, Lewis and Tolkien, enjoyed their positions as professors at Oxford University, which also resulted in financial security and a context in which their gifts could flower; the world Lewis inhabited was less secure and cloistered.

All three men were natural mythologist and their emotional lives found collective expression in works of fiction beyond their academic passions: Tolkien’s love of Norse led eventually to Middle Earth, Lewis interest in Medieval Theology to Narnia, but Williams’ path was less certain as he toiled working for the Oxford University Press constantly editing the work of others, writing reviews, delivering poetry lectures in the evening, writing his Arthurian poetry cycles and producing his extra-ordinary spiritual/psychological novels. The reader feels exhausted by the efforts and in deep sympathy for his situation. He rarely received the public affirmation he needed and which his efforts deserved. This was in part because his work did not fit the new modernist sensibility I have mentioned earlier.

Grevel Lindop communicates completely the relentless toil of William’s life, the ceaseless intellectual activity that is always sweetened by the kindness and patience of his nature. Yet, hanging over Williams is always the financial needs of his family and his desire for love. Indeed, the Arthurian poetry he writes is an attempt, through a mythical framework, to explore the laws of divine love that also acknowledge the human condition.

Lindop has certainly done much in untangling the early influences of William’s formative years. William’s exists as a thinker still firmly in the Christian world, but his religious influences were eclectic and a challenge to anything lazy or easily comforting; from his Uncle Charles Wall to his early attempt at mythologising with his school friends and their made-up country of Silvania. Of much interest is his interest in magical ritual and his membership of the Golden Dawn. These interests are explored fully in Chapters 5 and 6 and will fascinate all who are interested in William‘s novels, as many of the esoteric ideas learnt at these magical organisations are explored in those extraordinary works. In a wider sense, it was during these magical meetings that William’s explored his inner imaginative world, found the company of like minds and began to create a practical theology where his inner world and its energies met his external reality.

The many years William’s spends working as a publisher are a fascinating read as a parade of notable writers comes within his compass: W.H. Auden, Anne Ridler, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dylan Thomas, John Heath-Stubbs, the Oxford Inklings circle of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Nevill Coghill. The reader also begins to feel the weight of William’s remorseless endeavour and his inability to reconcile all aspects of this life. It is easy to see the appeal of the magical and the ritual to convey order and control over a life that seems to gutter on the edge of dissolution and ill health.

His long un-consummated affair with Phyllis Jones is complex and unusual. One certainly does not need to be a Jungian analyst to see the idealisation and feminine archetypes that Williams projects upon the woman in his life; his own wife, Michal, is idealised as a Beatrice figure until the day-to-day existence of motherhood and marriage separate ideal from reality. Grevel Lindop makes it clear that Williams and Jones are in love; for Williams, there is no question of telling his wife or of ‘making physical love to Phyllis’ (p.129). The relationship is fuelled and sustained by its illicit nature, and for Williams, it is clear that the erotic, the magical and the spiritual meet in Phyllis. The unconsummated nature of this relationship also generated the necessary suffering (and inner friction) to fire William’s literary output.

Grevel Lindop certainly handles the tricky area of William’s erotic and mildly sadomasochistic relationships with women deftly. These are no doubt related to William’s magical training and the belief in the transmutation of subtle energies for specific purposes. I would suggest that William’s practice of substituted love is a purer form of this and bears looking at in greater detail.

In his novels, poetry and theology, Charles Williams writes about what he called ‘the practice of substituted love’, which was in his works and his life the conscious and active manifestation of the ‘coinherence’ or ‘exchange’ at the heart of the Universe.

In the novel Descent into Hell two of the characters consciously practice this substitution and in the poem ‘The Founding of the Company’ (which is part of the Arthurian Cycle) the king’s poet becomes the leader of a company of those who are linked together, not by any rule or outer form, but simply by, ‘a certain pointing’, a free choice of the way of exchange that is conscious love. A theoretical definition of this concept appears in He Came Down to Earth. For Williams, there are three degrees of consciousness: 1. The old self on the old way, 2. The old self on the new way, and 3. The new self on the new way. Williams writes,

The second group is the largest at all times and in all places…

it forms…at most moments practically all of oneself that one can

know, for the new self does not know itself. It consists of the exist-

tence of the self, unselfish perhaps, but not yet denied. The self often

applies itself unselfishly. It transfers its activities from itself un-

selfishly as a centre to its belief as a centre.

The change Williams proceeds to define is the birth of a new kind of love: ‘To love is to die and to live again; to live from a new root…We are to love each other…by acts of substitution.’

Certainly in ‘Charles Williams – The Third Inkling’, something of this sense of ‘substituted love’ is conveyed in the quality of the life lived. C.S. Lewis says the highest compliment he ever heard paid to Lewis came from a Nun, who said that his manners ‘implied a complete offer of intimacy without its slightest imposition’. Lewis continues writing, ‘Williams threw down all his barriers without ever implying that you should lower yours. He gave to every circle the whole man; all his attention, knowledge, courtesy, charity, were placed at your disposal…The total offer of himself, but without the tacit claim which so often accompanies such offers,’ It was no doubt such a quality of being and insight that led to the invitation to join the Inklings. Sadly, these were informal group meetings where no minutes were taken; the reader can only wonder what was spoken of and the quality of such exchanges!

To achieve such a level of selfless individuation requires a life of conscious suffering and a commitment to a greater cause than the needs of the ego. Grevel Lindop’s carefully wrought biography captures the life of the last magician and asks us again to reappraise and value his work.

‘Charles Williams: The Third Inkling’ is a comprehensive biography of this unique and often conflicted man. The subject of William’s esoteric affiliation is finally revealed and helps all who love his extraordinary novels to contextualise them and yet retain their breathtaking originality that still surprises with each subsequent reading. My only point of criticism of what is a wonderful and informative read is that a greater emphasis on the novels would have been appreciated. One suspects from reading this biography that Grevel Lindop has a greater interest and sympathy for William’s poetry and theology than his novels, which are more widely read than the latter. Despite this, ‘Charles Williams – The Third Inkling’ is a must-read for all those interested in this unique thinker and writer.

As I said earlier, I will write more about Williams at a later date.

Thanks for reading,

David