Charles Williams: The Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop (review)

Poet, novelist, theologian, critic, editor, occultist, playwright, biographer, charismatic lecturer, spiritual director, cult figure: Charles Williams (1886–1945) was all this and more. So it is ironic that Grevel Lindop’s comprehensive biography must still present him as the “third Inkling,” the less famous friend—late in his life—of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis’s Christian apologetics and Tolkien’s epic fantasy brought them lasting, worldwide fame. But Williams, a celebrity in the 1930s and 40s, faded faster. For one thing, he died at just the wrong time—in the final days of World War II. For another, he remains a profoundly esoteric figure whose fame was inseparable from the force of his personality. An earlier “authorized” biography by Alice Mary Hadfield, a friend and disciple, shielded his darker sides (and there were many). Only now, seventy years after his passing, are all his letters available and his intimates departed, making it possible to write freely. The portrait that emerges is complex and troubling—yet Williams’ literary significance has never loomed larger.

He wrote prodigiously and with astonishing speed; more time for revision would have improved his oeuvre. But the demon at Williams’ back was poverty. Born “at the lowest edge of shabby-genteel respectability” (6), he managed barely two years of university, as his parents squandered his scholarship funds on day-to-day survival. By 1904 his formal education was over, save for evening classes at the London Working Men’s College—a socialist program to which he would contribute lavishly in his later years. His career in the book trade began with a lowly job packing Methodist tracts to ship to the mission field. After six months of this, he scored a post as proofreader at the Oxford University Press, where he would remain for the rest of his life—working his way up, through sheer intelligence, to an important editorship at a time when talent, rather than credentials, still made careers. Williams did the work of five men at the press, producing major editions of everyone from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Søren Kierkegaard, along with endless poetic and religious anthologies. But the august publisher never paid him anything like what he was worth. So, despite a savagely frugal lifestyle, he was always picking up commissions in a never-ending quest to make ends meet.

In 1917 Williams, exempt from the army because of poor eyesight, married his sweetheart, Florence “Michal” Conway. It was an embarrassingly small wedding—and a sadly disappointing marriage. Much like Tolkien, Williams had idealized his beloved during their long engagement, but the trials of domesticity and fatherhood caught him unprepared. From his early admiration for Coventry Patmore to his late championship of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, Williams maintained a lifelong commitment to “Romantic Theology,” a spiritual path based on the sublimation and transmutation of sexual energies. Though overshadowed by the ferment of psychoanalysis, that path appealed to a surprising number of poets, religious thinkers, and occultists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Williams, it entailed a limited sexual relationship with his wife (they had just one son, who inherited his father’s difficult temperament but not his genius), as well as a long, intense, unconsummated affair with Phyllis Jones, a colleague at the Press. Beginning as an ordinary office flirtation, the affair soon became a torment to both lovers and, of course, to Michal. For a time, Jones was no less smitten than Williams, but she eventually fled from his agonized chastity into the arms of another married lover, Gerry Hopkins (a nephew of the poet), then into marriage with a Javanese oilman. For Williams, who loved to bestow nicknames on his intimates, Jones became “Celia,” his heavenly Muse. More disturbingly, she was the first of many young women with whom he practiced “transmutation” in mildly sadistic rituals—casting them as naughty schoolgirls or disobedient slaves in his private mythology, punishing them with blows of a ruler or...