The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (42 page)

The Coming of the Dark

Co-inherence was soon to be sorely tested by events on a larger stage than Oxford. The Inklings had long suspected that war was on the way. Throughout the 1930s, Barfield fumed over England’s policy of appeasement toward Hitler. His anger intensified when the Nazi government banned the Anthroposophical Society in 1935. Even the London newspapers, he believed, intended to suppress news of Hitler’s misdeeds, and he canceled his subscription to
The Times
in protest. Lewis, by contrast, knew little of political machinations but dreaded the possibility of worldwide bloodshed. Dark forebodings filled his letters as the decade rushed to a close. On September 12, 1938, he wrote to Barfield what reads like a farewell letter, speculating that “our whole joint world may be blown up before the end of the week” and adding, “If we are separated, God bless you, and thanks for a hundred good things I owe to you, more than I can count or weigh. In some ways we’ve had a corking time these twenty years.” He harbored no doubts about the moral legitimacy of taking on the Germans, for, as he told Bede Griffiths, he had “always believed that it is lawful for a Christian to bear arms in war.” “Our Lord does not appear to have regarded the Roman soldiers as
ex officio
sinners,” he continued; “I cannot believe the knight errant idea to be sinful.” Pacifism offered a poor substitute; writing to
Theology
, he observed that “Christendom has made two efforts to deal with the evil of war—chivalry and pacifism. Neither succeeded. But I doubt whether chivalry has such an unbroken record of failure as pacifism.” He was ready to cheer on the troops.

Tolkien was primed as well. He, like Barfield, held a personal grudge against the Nazis, for besmirching whatever pride he felt in his German ancestry and for persecuting Jews, many of whom he counted as friends. His feelings boiled over in a magnificent letter addressed on July 25, 1938, to the Potsdam firm of R
ü
tten & Loening, which planned a German edition of
The Hobbit
and had inquired about Tolkien’s
arisch
(Aryan) background. “I regret,” Tolkien icily responded, “that I am not clear as to what you intend by
arisch
 … But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of
Jewish
origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have
no
ancestors of that gifted people.” For good measure, he added, with prescience, that if such inquiries continued, “the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.” Five months later, the Foreign Office approached him about working as a cryptographer if war should break out, and from March 27 to 30, 1939, he took the office’s four-day cryptography course. In October, however, for reasons that remain obscure but that may be connected to Edith’s precarious health, the office told him that his services would not be required.

Predictably, Williams had a more idiosyncratic view of the matter. He was convinced that the British, outmanned and outgunned, would lose to the Germans, and as a result he refused to endorse the war effort. Late one evening, Alice Hadfield spotted Williams and her future husband, an OUP employee, marching together up Oxford Street, Williams chanting “We don’t want to fight for Czechoslovakis” and his companion replying “Hear! Hear!” Prewar gloom had overspread Amen House. Esprit de corps had vanished, due in large measure to Williams’s own conflicted views. With palpable confusion and an edge of despair, he confessed to Alice that “if there were war I could wish we could all die together—as it is we shall have to hold separately to the Doctrine by ourselves … I am as terrified of my old age as you were of your immediate future, but I reject the terror.”

Events outmarched his terror and his defiance. A day or two later, on September 1, Hitler invaded Poland. Warnie, recalled to active service, headed to Yorkshire. The next day, Lewis sent him a letter that he signed, looking ahead and fearing the worst, “God save you, brother.” On September 3 at 11:15 a.m., Britain declared war on Germany. Tolkien, just returned from daily Mass, could not hide his agitation from Priscilla. Twenty-four hours later, Amen House and its employees, including Charles Williams, relocated to Oxford.

12

WAR, AGAIN

When Charles Williams, his clothes grimy from London soot, stepped off a train onto the Oxford platform on September 4, 1939, he entered a city that had changed dramatically. With the government’s proclamation at 11:07 a.m. on August 31 to “Evacuate Forthwith!” Operation Pied Piper had gone into effect, and up to three million children, mothers of young children, pregnant women, and invalids had fled possible German air attacks by moving out of major metropolitan areas. Ten to fifteen thousand child evacuees arrived in Oxford, to be crammed in wherever room could be found, not only in professorial residences like the Kilns but in empty cinemas and university towers. Blackout conditions ruled, plunging the cobbled streets into near-absolute darkness on moonless nights. The Examination Schools became a military hospital, the Ministry of Food commandeered St. John’s College, and the Ministry of Agriculture occupied a portion of Pembroke College, delighting Tolkien with a newly erected sign,
PESTS: FIRST FLOOR
. The university instituted a two-year “war degree,” but even that pittance tried the patience of many students who, matriculating at seventeen, joined the armed forces at eighteen and headed to the Continent or farther afield to be mowed down by Axis guns. The death rate was shocking; Jan Morris reports, in a typical instance, that “of the Trinity boat crew which won the Eights Week races in 1939, all but two died.” This slaughter notwithstanding, the “bewildered university,” as Tolkien described it, carried on as best it could with smaller classes and periodic food shortages, contributing to the war effort not only through enlistees but through faculty research, most notably when Professor of Pathology Howard Florey and his staff developed, in the early 1940s, a technique to process penicillin for clinical use.

In the midst of this transformation the Inklings thrived. War famously induces in those far from carnage, at least for a time, a giddy excitement, a sense of living in suspension, betwixt and between, plucked by the hand of history from the suffocating confines of ordinary life. So it was for many of the Oxford intelligentsia. Lewis, describing to Warnie a Thursday night meeting in November, wrote that “I have never in my life seen Dyson so exuberant—‘a roaring cataract of nonsense.’” After dining at the Eastgate Hotel, the troupe returned to Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen to hear a chapter from the new
Hobbit
, a nativity play by Williams (“unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all”), and a portion of Lewis’s
The Problem of Pain
.

This was the usual fare: at nearly every meeting of the band, as the readings ventured into new territory (Lewis’s apologetics, Williams’s study of Dante, medical treatises by Havard), the humor delighted, the conversation sparkled, and the beer flowed freely. The exhilaration of these wartime gatherings was due in large measure to Williams. Cast up on Oxford shores, he became a regular on Thursday nights and instantly impressed his hectic personality upon the groups. He declaimed long passages from his plays, novels, and essays; he speculated, challenged, and joked, always in motion, a whirling dervish in mind and body. Lewis started to think along Williamsesque lines, acquiring a fascination for Arthurian myth and weighing the possibility of using Earth rather than outer space as a stage for fantasy fiction (these twin interests would culminate in his 1945 fantasy,
That Hideous Strength
). Dyson ascended to new heights of biting humor; learning of Williams’s interest in chastity, he declared that his new friend was “becoming a common chastitute.” Some of the quieter Inklings, caught up in the excitement, began to join in more vigorously: Havard read papers on mountain climbing and on the nature of pain, while Adam Fox recited poetry. Warnie, when he returned in May 1940 from the Continent, read from the manuscript of
The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV
, his quirky, insightful study of seventeenth-century France, filled with a brooding sense of the dark tidal forces that rule history, altogether a surprise for those who had weighed up the elder Lewis as little more than his younger brother’s duller, boozier sidekick. Havard remembered Warnie’s reading as “very witty … very good … It took us out of the theological atmosphere into another world.” Nonetheless, Lewis and Tolkien continued to dominate meetings, Tolkien reading sections of the new
Hobbit
, Lewis bits of works in progress, including his translation of the
Aeneid
, a text that survives only in fragments, pieced together and published in 2011 as
C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile
.

Visitors, too, breached the gates, now and then generating friction within the core group. One Tuesday morning, Tolkien arrived at the Bird and Baby with Williams in tow and spied “a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose, sitting in the corner,” looking very much like Trotter (Strider’s original name) at the Inn of the Prancing Pony in
The Lord of the
Rings
, as Tolkien noted in a letter to Christopher on October 6, 1944. The mysterious figure was Roy Campbell, a right-wing Catholic poet who had fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and had arrived in Oxford partly in order to meet Lewis. Lewis, however, despised Campbell (whom he had previously parodied in
The Oxford Magazine
), ostensibly for his fascism. Tolkien, who felt some kinship with Campbell over their shared faith, suspected that Lewis’s dislike was inspired in part by anti-Catholic bigotry, and he complained bitterly to Christopher that when Lewis heard of Catholic priests being murdered, as happened frequently in Spain during the 1930s, he “really thinks they asked for it.” Another odd visitor who attended several Inklings meetings was E. R. Eddison, a childhood pal of Arthur Ransome and author of
The Worm Ouroboros
(1922), a rococo space fantasy set on Mercury. Lewis adored
Ouroboros
, reading it at least six times and praising it and Eddison’s other novels as “a new literary species, a new rhetoric, a new climate of the imagination.” Eddison had crafted for his novels an artificial, dense, mock-medieval voice, first cousin to Morris’s and Tolkien’s heigh stile, and he and Lewis took to corresponding with one another in this register. His account of his first Thursday night gathering catches the flavor of the group, of his peculiar manner, and of this curious exchange of letters:

And so to that quincunciall symposium, at ease about your sea-cole fire, in your privat chaumbre, where (as it seemed to mee) good discourse made night’s horses gallop too faste; & so to our goodnight walke & adieux in the gate under your great Towre … For my self, I tasted wisdome as wel as good ale at your fireside … If our talk were battledore & shuttlecock, what matter? ’Twas merry talk, & truth will sometimes appere, better than in statu, in the swift flying to & again of the shuttlecock.

As the gaming analogy shows, Eddison grasped the essence of the Inklings’ method: thrashing out the truth through verbal play. But he never shared their vision of truth, disdaining in his fiction and in his few published letters such Christian virtues as simplicity and poverty. Tolkien, who vastly admired Eddison’s literary skills, ranking him the most gifted of all inventors of imaginary worlds, described the philosophy that permeates every page of
Ouroboros
and his other novels as a celebration of “arrogance and cruelty.” Tolkien may be unjust in this assessment; Eddison admired grandeur, strength, brooding intelligence, and refined beauty, qualities that, under Mercury’s perverse skies, flourish in lieu of love, compassion, and hobbitlike humility. Perhaps because of Tolkien’s objections—the two butted heads from the start—Eddison never became a regular among the Inklings.

More significant—and perplexing—were Tolkien’s reservations about Charles Williams. His response to Williams seemed inversely keyed to Lewis’s; the more Lewis admired Williams, the more Tolkien demurred. Some scholars have put his disaffection down to plain jealousy of the man who displaced him as Lewis’s best friend. There is truth in this; by 1939, Lewis had absorbed most of Tolkien’s ideas and literary motifs and was ready to be dazzled by someone new. In a letter he would write to his former pupil Mary Neylan shortly after Williams’s death, Lewis refers to him as “my great friend Charles Williams, my friend of friends, the comforter of all our little set, the most angelic”; small wonder that the sensitive Tolkien felt elbowed aside.

Nonetheless, Tolkien enjoyed Williams’s company and valued his critical acumen. During the war, he wrote a poem that reveals, if not his deepest feelings about Williams, at least those he was willing to express; in it he calls Williams “dear Charles” and lauds his “subtle mind,” his “virtues,” and his “wisdom.” He and Williams drank together, went on midnight strolls together, regaled one another at Inklings gatherings. Tolkien went out of his way to help Williams lecture at the university and, most tellingly, loaned him portions of the
Hobbit
sequel while still in manuscript (Williams immediately put his finger on one great strength of the tale: the bucolic peace of the Shire in contrast to the wrenching horrors of war). But mutual affability notwithstanding, Tolkien disdained William’s literary works, declaring in 1965 that he found them “wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous.” Whence the antipathy? Distrusting Williams’s penchant for magic, he may have suspected (correctly) that behind these plot devices lay personal occult experience kept strictly hidden from the Inklings. It is easy to understand why, when Lewis wrote in the 1947 Festschrift
Essays Presented to Charles Williams
that “he gave to every circle the whole man,” Tolkien scribbled in the margin of his personal copy, “No, I think not.”