The Essence of CS Lewis

Cafe Society
21

A few sides about Williams (I’ve read Many Dimensions, Descent Into Hell, and my favorite- The Greater Trumps, I still gotta read The Place of the Lion, and I have to get my hands on All Hallows Eve)-

in his pre-C’tian days, he was a member of a latter version of The Order of the Golden Dawn, which in an earlier form has Aleister Crowley as a member;

he developed a lovely & profound mystical view of the interconnectivity of the Trinity within Themselves, with & among humans (and probably all the rest of Creation) under the terms of CoInherence, out of which came his view of Transposition- the actual psychic assuming of others burdens, BUT in his personal life, he had a dark side involving power & pain, in which he had a non-sexual (?)
affair with a female student involving a bit of S-M play. To his credit, he did keep it more restrained than a lesser man would have, and I think did end it out of remorse & shame.

There is a really good graphic novel entitled Heaven’s War in which Williams (aided by Tolkien & Lewis) battles Crowley on the astral plane which the latter
has invaded to inflict some damage. A fun point- as Crowley slips along the time
stream, he pops into a late 60s record store- he’s quite thrilled to be on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

22

FriarTed writes:

> . . . in his pre-C’tian days . . .

I don’t know in what sense the time that Charles Williams spent in the Order of the Golden Dawn could be considered to be his pre-Christian days. He apparently always considered himself to be a devout Anglican. He drifted away from association with groups like the Order of the Golden Dawn and toward groups like the Inklings in his later years, but there was apparently never any big break. There was always a mystical element in his belief. Although I’ve read a fair amount of Williams, I’m not an expert. Could you explain why Williams’s earlier years could be considered pre-Christian, other than you don’t like the people he hung around with in his early life and you like the ones he hung around with in his later life (and I agree with you about that)?

23

OK, now that I’m challenged, I gotta admit I don’t know- I assumed that Williams wasn’t a C’tian, or at least not a devout one in those days but now I can’t say that was a fact.

24

An interesting fact about Williams and Tolkien: I’m presently at a conference about Tolkien in Birmingham, England. One talk here was about the personal relationship between Tolkien and Williams. In some letters written in his old age, twenty years or so after Williams died, Tolkien often speaks as though he was never good friends with Williams or agreed with him about much. He seemed to say that he’d only associated with Williams because the two of them were both friends of Lewis.

The speaker went through all the available letters and diary entries and it seems clear that this was revisionism on Tolkien’s part. Tolkien and Williams got along fine during the period (about 1940 to 1945) when they would have known each other. It appears that it was just in his memory, in old age, that Tolkien remembered not being good friends or agreeing with Willimas about most things.

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I haven’t got access to the primary sources, but I think one important consideration is that Tollers was perhaps willing to overlook Williams’s eccentricities, mysticism, etc. during the Inklings Years because Williams, unlike Hugo Dyson, approved of LOTR (“the new Hobbit”, as it was known at those meetings) and encouraged T. As evinced in his Foreword to the second edition of LOTR, written in 1966, T. was of a rather curmudgeonly - one might say ungracious - disposition to those who criticised his tome as one long yawn. (In this aspect of temperament, one might compare Gandalf, who was described as prone to bad temper by T - self-reflection perhaps. One must wonder how much of himself T. saw in his three main heroes: Frodo, the ingenuous and brave, Aragorn, the warrrior and brave, Gandalf, the sage and brave. Was Sam perhaps based to an extent on C.S. Lewis, who was as much a source of encouragement to T. as Sam was to Frodo, and whom the older man once described as not having been an influence on him, albeit a source of tremendous encouragement, without whom the book might never have been published?).

Here’s the relevant bit from T.'s Foreword, which stands out even today for the pique it displays: “Some who have read this book, or at any rate have reviewed it(!), have found it boring, absurd or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works…”

A contemporary letter from T. to his son Christopher shows how much store the linguistics professor set in his readers getting the message that he wanted to convey, rather than drawing inferences that he felt were not valid or correct, a bugbear to him right to the end: “C. Williams who is reading it all says the great thing is that its centre is not in strife and war and heroism (though they are understood and depicted) but in freedom, peace, ordinary life and good living.”

Dr. Humphrey Havard, who attended a lot of Inklings’ meetings during the war when not at sea, recalled (later, I assume, so he may - though equally may not - be operating on hindsight) T.'s reservations about Williams’s fascination with the occult, and noted that these reservations strained the relationship between T. and L.