Lewis did not often come to London. Business rarely took him there, and he saw in the capital city little of the significance that Williams perceived, finding it to be mostly chaos where Williams could distinguish order. But he did sometimes have to make a journey up from Oxford, and next time this happened he accepted Williams’s invitation and had lunch with him. He was as fascinated by Williams the man as he had been by The Place of the Lion.
‘He is’, he told Arthur Greeves, ‘of humble origin (there are still traces of Cockney in his voice), ugly as a chimpanzee but so radiant (he emanates more love than any man I have ever known) that as soon as he begins talking he is transfigured and looks like an angel. He sweeps some people quite off their feet and has many disciples. Women find him so attractive that if he were a bad man he could do what he liked either as a Don Juan or a charlatan.’
*
By this time Williams did indeed have ‘disciples’, largely as a result of lecturing for the Evening Institutes. After a bravura performance in the lecture itself, he would lead a discussion which electrified his audience into believing that they themselves were almost as clever and interesting as he was. An inevitable result was that many of them stayed behind to talk to him afterwards; and an inevitable result of that was a long conversation, usually conducted as he sat with his pupils in a tea shop or strolled with them through the London streets – the habit of peripatetic talking had remained with him since the childhood walks with his father. Nor did it end there, for a number of friends he made in this fashion ceased to be contented with a once-weekly meeting at an evening class, and began to search him out at the Press. At Amen House, ‘C. W.’s young women’ (as they were known) soon made up a large proportion of the visitors.
The majority of those who sought him out were indeed young women, and, as Lewis noted, they found him extremely attractive. Not that he was good-looking in a conventional way; one female admirer spoke disparagingly of the shape of his mouth, and of ‘his curious accent and the unpleasing timbre of his voice’. But she added: ‘Of all these details I was unconscious. His was a dignity which outsoared absurdity; as his was an attractiveness so potent that it turned the ugliness of his voice and features to no account.’
The source of this potent attraction was hard to define. It was partly the manner of his movements, the way he would sweep himself upstairs, whirl a visitor into a room, and offer a greeting or conduct a farewell with Elizabethan courtesy, bending over the hand of a female friend and kissing it lightly. It was also the intensity of his gaze; and it was the blend of sympathy, as he listened to an outpouring of troubles and personal problems, with command; for he would answer any such outpouring with a firm instruction, holding the friend by the wrist and counting on her fingers as he spoke: ‘Love – obey – pray – play – and be intelligent.’ It was also his lack of self-consciousness, which allowed him to call unblushingly to a young woman friend across a crowded railway carriage: ‘God bless you, child. Under the Protection.’
There was, in other words, a good deal of personal magnetism. And there was also something in his manner that is best described as incantatory. The benediction called across the railway carriage and the rhythmic phrase tapped out on the fingers were manifestations of this; as were his lectures, in which he chanted lines of verse almost as if they were magical formulae. They were not always lines that made any great sense out of context – ‘And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake’ from Paradise Lost and ‘Felt in the blood and felt along the heart’ from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ were among his favourites – but he did not believe that the actual meaning of such lines was especially important. ‘There has been a great deal too much talking of what the poets mean,’ he wrote in The English Poetic Mind. And in another context he said: ‘It isn’t what poetry says, it is what poetry is.’ What poetry was to him was a storehouse of emotional or even supernatural power. He believed he could come into contact with that power by chanting lines of great verse. Like Roger Ingram in Shadows of Ecstasy he ‘submitted his obedience to the authority of Milton and Wordsworth, waiting for the august plenitude of their poetry to be manifested within him’.
This was not the usual stuff of London County Council evening classes, but many of his audience found it magnificent. And if they became friends with him, it was only the first of several metaphysical notions with which he presented them. Those who showed themselves particularly sympathetic to his ideas were told that they might like to regard themselves as one of the ‘Companions of the Co-inherence.’
*
It was not Williams’s own idea to form an Order. The impetus to establish it came from his disciples, and for a long time he was reluctant to do any such thing. But at last he agreed to permit those who desired it to call themselves members of a Company, and in time he came to like the idea. Some years later he expressed the nature of such a body in a poem which was part of his Arthurian cycle, ‘The Founding of the Company’:
Grounded in the Acts of the Throne and the pacts of the themes,
it lived only by conceded recollection,
having no decision, no vote or admission,
but for the single note that any soul
took of its own election of the Way; the whole
shaped no frame nor titular claim to place.
The ‘Companions of the Co-inherence’ (the name generally given to the group, though it was often referred to as ‘the Household’ or ‘the Company’) took their title from one of Williams’s central ideas, which had first grown in his mind during the 1914–18 war, when his grief at the death of the two close friends of his Working Men’s College days eventually persuaded him that all human beings are totally dependent on each other, that indeed ‘no man is an Island’, and that each thought or action has a bearing on other people. This idea he called Co-inherence, and he developed it further, suggesting that even evil actions will produce good and that many good things will lead to evil. There is, he believed, an enormous potential both for good and evil in every piece of human behaviour. Not that this argued against there being such a thing as sin. ‘Sin’, he said, ‘is the preference of an immediately satisfying experience to the declared pattern of the universe’; and it is, he said, the Christian’s duty to perceive that pattern (‘the eternal dance’ he called it in The Greater Trumps) and to act according to it.
Williams’s ‘Co-inherence’ harmonised with orthodox Christian teaching. But others of his doctrines which the Companions were asked to observe and practise were less conventional.
First was Romantic Theology. He impressed upon those close to him that lovers should see in each other a reflection of God, that in the beauty of the beloved ‘an explanation of the whole universe is being offered, and indeed in some sense understood; only it cannot be defined’. Romantic Theology was not peculiar to Williams – he had found it, of course, in Dante – but it was more idiosyncratic than Co-inherence, and when he drafted a book on it in the early nineteen-twenties and offered it to the Press, Humphrey Milford was distinctly dubious, and sent the manuscript to an adviser for comment. Unfortunately for Williams that adviser was ‘Tommy’ Strong, the Bishop of Oxford, who was not only a bachelor but reputedly a misogynist. Not surprisingly Strong did not recommend that ‘Outlines of Romantic Theology’ be published, and the book remained in manuscript, its contents gradually being absorbed into Williams’s other writings during the succeeding years.
The real gulf between Williams and such churchmen as Strong was not in their attitudes to women but in their approach to the Christian life. Indeed, Williams was steering a markedly different course from that chosen by the majority of Christian teachers over the centuries. Traditionally, the Church has more often emphasised asceticism and the rejection of worldly enjoyment than the alternative, the transmutation of the delights of the world into the Christian vision. But it was this last method which Williams adhered to. He called it The Way of Affirmation, as opposed to the ascetic Way of Rejection. His Romantic Theology was ‘affirmative’ in that it used worldly love as its starting-point rather than rejecting it in favour of an ascetic life; and there was Affirmation too in Williams’s other principal doctrine which was practised by the Companions of the Co-inherence: the practice of ‘Substitution’ or ‘Substituted Love’. This doctrine was not developed by Williams until some years after he had outlined Romantic Theology, and it was never communicated to Bishop Strong, which was perhaps just as well; for that ecclesiastical dignitary would undoubtedly have been highly perturbed by it.
The first notion of Substitution occurred to Williams in 1932. ‘I have a point to discuss with you’, he wrote to a young friend from the evening classes, Thelma Shuttleworth, ‘which makes me wonder whether the New Testament may not be merely true in some of its advice. All about “bearing one another’s burdens”. I have an awful (full of awe) feeling that one can.’
In his thinking and writings Williams had already paid much attention to the metaphorical implications of ‘bear ye one another’s burdens’. It was a natural development from Co-inherence to observe the degree in which human life depends on the principle of exchange, on the sharing of tasks and responsibilities. Mundane forms of this exchange include commerce (where money is offered in return for goods) and professional and business life (where members of the community undertake specialised responsibilities by which they serve others). These mundane exchanges can of course be seen in any city, and this helped to strengthen Williams’s notion of cities in general and the City of London in particular as a type of the City of God, for he believed that Exchange was a heavenly principle. But as to the literal implications of St Paul’s words about bearing one another’s burdens, that was another matter.
Could personal burdens be born by others? Could, for example, someone racked by worry or anxiety pass that particular emotional burden to someone else who had agreed voluntarily to accept it? Williams came to believe that this could in fact be done, simply by a mutual pact, came to believe even that actual physical pain could be taken over by someone who was willing to substitute himself or herself for the sufferer. And this Substitution became an important activity of the Companions of the Co-inherence.1
*
Did it work? Certainly a number of responsible and sensible people who knew Williams were strongly persuaded that it did. It was after all in spirit entirely Christian – Williams regarded the Crucifixion as the ultimate Substitution, by which Christ offered his own suffering for the sins of the world. On the other hand, like so much of Williams’s thought, it did have an air of the magical. And did Williams have any right to assume authority in it, instructing (as he sometimes did) one of the Companions to substitute herself for another who was going through some physical or emotional difficulty?
‘Substitution’ played quite a large part in Williams’s letters to the Companions and to other friends and admirers. And though his letters did not deal only with such spiritual matters – he often discussed his poetry, or the absurdities of daily life, all with a delightfully wry wit2 – they tended, as one of his disciples in the nineteen-forties, Lois Lang-Sims, remarked, to consist of ‘a tremendous flow of words’. The letters were also open to misinterpretation. ‘My dear Thelma,’ he began one such letter,
I very nearly adore you. In fact I do; so that you can say, as the Angel in the Apocalypse said to the Divine John, ‘See thou do it not’. But one may adore Love-in-Thelma, and think that the dwelling place of the Eternal that dwelleth in the heavens is a very transmuting one. Remember that you are more lucid, more beautiful, more Love. I add in a postscript that you are as divine a creature as I have ever known in this high pursuit of Love.
Thelma Shuttleworth was wise enough in the ways of Charles Williams to know that this was a demonstration of Romantic Theology rather than of erotic passion. She recalled of these years, ‘We were together in love, though never with one another.’ But others did not find it so easy to make the distinction, or did not care to. ‘I was by this time’, wrote Lois Lang-Sims of her growing feelings for Williams, ‘“in love” with Charles in the sense that I wanted to be his mistress.’
He never took sexual advantage of any of his disciples who found themselves in this state of mind; or at least he did not do so in the conventional sense. His general rule, as C. S. Lewis observed, was ‘to teach them the ars honesta amandi and then bestow them on other (younger) men’. On the other hand Lois Lang-Sims alleges that on one occasion he put his arms round her and ‘held me in a strange stillness, a silence so unlike his usual loquacity, a motionlessness so unlike his usual excitement, that nothing could have been further from the kind of behaviour my previous knowledge of him had led me to expect’. At the time she was greatly puzzled, not to say alarmed. Later she thought she recognised in this behaviour a kind of ritual that was sometimes practised by magical sects, and even by some early Christians until the practice was strongly suppressed in the Church, a ritual that attempts to heighten consciousness and increase power by harnessing the sexual instinct, and achieving a kind of tension-of-polarity between desire and restraint. If Lois Lang-Sims was right,1 Williams was actually putting into practice the kind of thing he had hinted at some years earlier in Shadows of Ecstasy, where a young lover sees in his mind the naked physical beauty of his beloved, but instead of aiming his desires towards sexual consummation ‘seemed to control and compel them into subterranean torrents towards hidden necessities within him’.
Those of Williams’s disciples who confessed to small failures or a general lapse of conduct would find that he imposed some small penance upon them; for instance, ‘You’ll copy out for me the first twelve verses of the 52nd chapter of Isaiah: you will do this as soon as you can, and you’ll learn the first three verses by heart.’ Occasionally too there was evidence here of the sadistic element in his personality, for he would sometimes threaten a whipping as a punishment for misbehaviour. But this remained in the realm of fantasy.
Williams himself had no delusions about his own personality. ‘God forbid I should call myself an apostle!’ he told Thelma Shuttleworth. ‘I am the least – O unworthy, unworthy! – of all.’ But he believed firmly that his own failings made not a jot of difference to the validity of his teaching. ‘St Paul knew that it is possible to preach to others and yet to be a castaway,’ he wrote. ‘Only – and this the fools sometimes forget – the preaching is true all the same.’
He often emphasised this point in his writings. Of the poet Peter Stanhope in the novel Descent into Hell – a character undoubtedly based on what Williams would have liked to be1 – it is said: ‘Whether his personal life could move to the sound of his own lucid exaltation of verse she [Pauline Anstruther] did not know. It was not her business; perhaps it was not even his.’ And when discussing Dante and the Way of Affirmation (i.e. Romantic Theology), Williams declares: ‘We do not know if, or how far, Dante himself in his personal life cared or was able to follow the Way he defined, nor is it our business.’ These remarks ought to be remembered during any investigation of Williams’s own life. Moreover, the personality expressed in his writings and remembered by his friends did show a positive quality of inner calm, of humility; so that it is possible to understand how T. S. Eliot could say of Williams, ‘He seemed to me to approximate, more nearly than any man I have known familiarly, to the saint.’
*
‘What finally convinced me that he has written a great poem was a transformation which my judgment underwent in reading it.’ The periodical in which this review appeared was Theology for April 1939; the reviewer was C. S. Lewis. After long effort, Williams had published the first volume of his cycle of Arthurian poetry, Taliessin through Logres.
‘I liked its “flavour” from the first,’ wrote Lewis, ‘but found it so idiosyncratic that I thought the book might be what Lamb called a “favourite”, a thing not for all days or all palates, like Tristram Shandy or the Arcadia. But as I went on I found bit after bit of my “real world” falling into its place in the poem. I found pair after pair of opposites harmoniously reconciled. I began to see that what had seemed a deliciously private universe was the common universe after all: that this apparently romantic and even wilful poem was really “classic” and central. I do not think this can happen in a minor work.’
After their first meeting at which he had been captivated by Williams, Lewis continued to see him as often as possible, though the friendship was limited by the distance between Oxford and London. Occasionally Williams came down to visit Lewis at Magdalen; more often the meetings were in London, either in Williams’s tiny office at Amen House or at his favourite lunch-place, Shirreff’s under the railway arch in Ludgate Hill. Williams usually had nothing more than a sandwich for his lunch, but on one memorable occasion in 1938 Lewis brought his brother Warnie and Hugo Dyson with him from Oxford, and they all ate (said Lewis) ‘kidneys enclosed, like the wicked man, in their own fat’. After lunch they walked about and sat in St Paul’s churchyard, conducting what Lewis afterwards remembered as an ‘almost Platonic discussion’.
Lewis and Williams continued to profess enthusiasm for each other’s writings. When in 1938 Williams published what might be called a ‘handlist’ of his interpretations of Christian doctrine, He Came Down From Heaven, he referred in it to Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, which he called ‘one of the most important critical books of our time’. Lewis was equally enthusiastic about Taliessin through Logres when it appeared in the same year, and his support was especially valuable to Williams, because otherwise the book met with little success.
This was scarcely surprising, for the poems it contained were extremely difficult to understand, even by the standard of Williams’s other writings. He paid little attention to the central events of the Arthurian story but concentrated on lesser-known details from Malory, and introduced other figures, most notably Taliessin, the poet of Celtic legend, whom he made King’s Poet at Arthur’s court – and whose character and role had a relation to Williams’s own idea of himself. He named Arthur’s kingdom ‘Logres’, using a Celtic word for Britain, and he made Logres a province of ‘The Empire’, by which he meant literally the Byzantine Empire and metaphorically the Kingdom of God on earth. Geographical features of his Arthurian landscape included not just Malory’s ‘Carbonek’ (the Grail castle) and ‘Sarras’ (the earthly paradise or ‘land of the Trinity’) but also ‘Broceliande’, a forest of metaphysical rather than physical character, a ‘place of making’ from which both good and evil may come; and there was also ‘P’o-l’u’, the antipodean seat of a diabolical Anti-Emperor. This name was a private jest, though a sad one, for Williams had found ‘P’o-l’u’ on a map of Java, and it was to Java that his Celia had gone after her marriage. On top of all this was an extra layer of symbolism, by which different parts of the human body were chosen to represent different provinces of the Empire: the head for Logres, the breasts for Gaul, the buttocks for Caucasia; while these provinces themselves represented spiritual characteristics. Williams had adapted this idea from the Sephirotic Tree in A. E. Waite’s Secret Doctrine in Israel, and he used it literally ‘on top’ of the geography of his Arthurian poems, for on the endpapers of Taliessin through Logres was printed a map of the Empire with a naked female body superimposed.
Taliessin went almost unnoticed. It was meant by Williams to be the finest expression of his thought, and he had taken many years over the development of the poems in it, the majority of which were far more modern in style than his earlier verse; they showed some influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the collected edition of whose poems he had revised for the Press, and they had also benefited from the advice of a friend, the young poet Anne Ridler. But for the most part they were incomprehensible to anyone not entirely conversant with Williams’s ideas. ‘Taliessin through Logres contained some beautiful poetry,’ wrote T. S. Eliot a year after the book was published, ‘but also some of the most obscure poetry that was ever written.’
Williams was in fact having little popular success with any of his books, though this was not for lack of trying. During the nineteen-thirties his output was immense. Besides the poetry there were three volumes of literary criticism, several plays (including Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury which was performed at the Canterbury Festival the year after Murder in the Cathedral), two theological books (He Came Down From Heaven and The Descent of the Dove), innumerable book reviews for newspapers and for Time & Tide, and five historical biographies, of Henry VII, Elizabeth, James I, Bacon, and the Restoration poet Rochester. He also wrote a number of articles, edited The New Book of English Verse for Gollancz, revised the Bridges edition of Hopkins’ poems, and contributed to several anthologies for the Oxford University Press. And on top of this there were the novels.
The historical biographies were the product of an intimate knowledge of their subjects and periods, but they were undertaken to earn money and were written in a hurry. Inevitably they often revealed themselves as pot-boilers. ‘He always boiled an honest pot,’ said T. S. Eliot of them; but too often Williams resorted to stylistic mannerisms. Graham Greene, reviewing Rochester, singled out this passage:
‘The poor benefit of a bewildering minute’ had a vivid place in the awareness of my lord’s poetic genius. It is in the mere admiration of what, in the contrasting line of Mr T. S. Eliot, has been, with a larger but inclusive scope, called ‘the infirm glory of the positive hour’. It was precisely the ‘infirm glory’ and ‘the poor benefit’ of which my lord’s angry contempt was contendingly aware.
Graham Greene called this ‘pretentious jargon’, and said that one would hardly think it referred to a bawdy incident at the Customs. ‘A great deal of the book is very badly written,’ he added. ‘Mr Williams loses himself hopelessly in abstractions.’
Even when Williams’s work was good, the fact that his large output covered several different fields of literature meant that he did not make his name as a specialist. Until 1939 only his novels built up any substantial regular following, and even then their sales were small. Gollancz, who published the first five, were not encouraged, and when Williams offered them another novel in 1937 they rejected it.
This rejection was partly because the new book, Descent into Hell, was notably different from its predecessors, lacking their crisply dramatic opening chapters and having very little of the ‘thriller’ about it. It would probably not have been published at all had not T. S. Eliot accepted it on behalf of Faber & Faber, of which he was a director. Eliot said that he did not find it as enthralling as Williams’s earlier novels; but he liked it enough to want to see it in print. In fact Descent into Hell was a remarkable piece of work, in many ways better than anything Williams had done before. It was slow to gather momentum but eventually achieved a terrifying sense of the damnation of one man. Yet when it was published its success in financial terms was no greater than that of its predecessors. By this time Williams had to resign himself to the fact that if he had not exactly failed as a writer, he had by no means achieved the success for which he had once perhaps hoped.
When war broke out in September 1939 he was fifty-two and not in the best of health – he had undergone a serious operation for a gastric disorder, intussuception, some years earlier. He was also very tired. He was, too, saddened by what had happened to the Press in the ten years since the Masques had been performed. The old sense of purpose had gone. Humphrey Milford, now Sir Humphrey, seemed more remote, and had withdrawn himself from all but necessary conversation (he was in fact suffering from an undiagnosed illness). And now, at the outbreak of war, the entire staff of Amen House were to be evacuated to Oxford. ‘To think we said the Masque was God!’ Williams wrote sadly.
It was? My dear! How very odd!
But if it was you must allow
God is as dead as doornails now.