The Oddest Inkling

A few months ago, the reading group I belong to discussed a Charles Williams novel. Williams was a member of the Inklings and a close friend of CS Lewis. I first started reading him after reading an interview with JI Packer, who recommended him highly as someone with a strong awareness of the supernatural world.

In the introduction to The Descent of the Dove, a history of the Holy Spirit in the Church, WH Auden writes: “In his company one felt twice as intelligent and infinitely nicer than, out of it, one knew oneself to be. It wasn’t simply that he was a sympathetic listener — he talked a lot and he talked well — but, more than anyone else I have ever known, he gave himself completely to the company that he was in.”

TS Eliot, similarly, wrote an introduction to All Hallows’ Eve (one of Williams’ more unsettling books): “Some men are less than their works, some are more. Charles Williams cannot be placed in either class. To have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough; but no one who has known both the man and his works would have willingly foregone either experience. I can think of no other writer who was more wholly the same man in his life and in his writings.”

And yet, he didn’t impress everyone in a positive way. He and CS Lewis were close friends, but JRR Tolkien disliked his books, and Lewis’ enthusiasm about Williams put a strain on his friendship with Tolkien (who blamed That Hideous Strength, the third volume in the space trilogy, on Williams’ influence). Alan Jacobs, in The Narnian, suggests that anyone reading his biography will tend to find him “somewhat creepy.” And he finds Williams’ novels “deeply disturbing.” Since I haven’t yet read his biography, I can’t comment on what Jacobs says about it, but I can see why he finds the novels, especially All Hallows’ Eve, disturbing. But still, CS Lewis, WH Auden and TS Eliot believed they, in some sense, became better people through his personal influence.

JI Packer, the one who first interested me in Williams, says, “With a powerful imagination fed by Trinitarian and incarnational faith, Charles Williams used fiction to explore how people react when the supernatural enters their lives, and how then to find the path of peace. The fantasy novels that resulted make a riveting read.” And TS Eliot makes a similar observation: “For him there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world.... To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural.” That’s the thing that keeps bringing me back to his books, this intense awareness of the supernatural in our lives.