Grevel Lindop: “Charles Williams, the Third Inkling”
I thought this a truly excellent biography. All credit is due Grevel Lindop: this must have been very much a labour of love as Williams is not exactly well-known and large sales must have been an unlikely prospect. It is helped by access to many of his letters that show an intimate side of a kind that is not usually available to biographers.
When the book arrived I was a little put off by its size, but once I began reading I soon found that I was really enjoying both Williams’ depth of perspective into the human/spiritual condition and also his decidedly unusual quirks (I won't go into his means of accessing the creative muse), to the extent that I read just a few pages a day to spin it out. I thought when I first read about him in Carpenter’s “Inklings” that I wish I’d been able to hear him lecture, as I got a sense there of his capacity to enthrall an audience and take them along with him to new heights of perception of whatever was being discussed, and this biography bears this out the more so. He seems to have had a remarkable capacity to enable others to feel good about themselves – (witness just one example, W.H.Auden’s recollection: “For the first time in my life I felt myself in the presence of personal sanctity. I had met many good people before who made me feel ashamed of my own shortcomings, but in the presence of this man – we never discussed anything but literary business – I did not feel ashamed. I felt transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base or unloving. I later discovered that he had a similar effect on many people.”) - and to look at life, literature and the spiritual through fresh eyes.
Williams operated through the perspective of Christianity, and I am hardly versed in Christianity, but this seemed kind of irrelevant to me in my reading, as his take on Christianity always appears to go to the heart of the spiritual rather than to a particular creed. For example one practice that was very significant for him was that of taking on others’ distress through prayer, which seems very similar to the Tibetan practice of “tong-lin”, though Williams could not have known of this.
There is also extensive discussion of Williams’ poetry, and while this went pretty much over my head, I could still get some sort of appreciative sense of it, perhaps because Grevel Lindop is, I believe, a poet himself.
For those looking for details on the Inklings, and Tolkien in particular, they only appear towards the end of the book and there is not a lot of information on them. However I was pleased to read this description of Warnie, C.S.Lewis’ brother, “….W.H.Lewis, a man who stays in my mind as the most courteous I have ever met – not with a mere politeness, but with a genial, self-forgetful considerateness that was as instinctive to him as breathing”, because in my limited reading Warnie usually seems to be given a poor deal by commentators due to his use of/ problems with alcohol. Likewise I could see ample evidence that Tolkien very much enjoyed and valued Williams’ company in those Inkling years despite the oft-reported jaundiced comment he made in later life, "nothing to say to each other at deeper (or higher) levels", (which may well have been affected by having learned in the meantime of some of Williams' "quirks").
I’ve really enjoyed this, and before starting it I’d read nothing of his published work.
