Tuesday 18 November 2014

If Charles Williams did preside at Inklings meetings - why might this fact have been unrecorded? The Tolkien Red Herring

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I have argued that there are good grounds for believing that Charles Williams (rather than CS Lewis) assumed a dominant, 'presiding' role at Inklings meetings during the 1939-45 years he was in Oxford -

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/evidence-that-charles-williams-presided.html

If I am correct about this, why would it not have been mentioned specifically such that the fact was not suspected?

The main evidence would have needed to come from CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. Lewis does not say that Charles Williams 'took over' from him at Inklings meetings; however, Lewis was always keen to emphasize the convivial aspects of the Inklings and downplay the formal elements. And his almost unbounded admiration of and praise for Williams in letters after CW's death and the introduction to Essays Presented to Charles Williams certainly do not contradict the idea of CW presiding.

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But JRR Tolkien said nothing of this kind - indeed, Tolkien threw a large Red Herring into Inklings studies which has confused most scholars since; when from the late 1950s or early 60s Tolkien began to 'rewrite' his own relationship with Charles Williams, and present a distorted history of his own relationship with Williams - downplaying his own friendship, claiming not to like William's work, claiming Williams was really just a favourite of CSL, and that this happened because Lewis was too impressionable.

Tolkien is, indeed, so negative about Williams that many Inklings scholars state that Tolkien was jealous of Williams having displaced himself as Lewis's best friend.

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However, there is no trace of this in published contemporary evidence of letters, diaries etc, deriving from while Williams was still alive and in the period afterwards. This is unanimous that Tolkien and CW were good friends, and got on well together, there is no trace of 'jealousy' -

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/was-tolkien-jealous-of-charles-williams.html

Above, I argue that Tolkien retrospectively changed his mind against Williams, after some of the revelations concerning Williams life which were published in the late 1950s (perhaps related to Williams's participation in ritual magic and/or his un-Christian relationships with young women) - but this was all more than a decade after Williams's death.

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It also seems that Tolkien was strongly and decisively influenced by Williams's novel The Place of the Lion; but much of this clear influence is only evident in the unpublished novels The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers  -

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/tolkien-and-lewiss-annus-divertium-of.html

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Since Tolkien only became famous, and oft-interviewed, after he had turned-against Charles Williams, and after CS Lewis had died, the best potential source of information on the nature of Inklings meetings and their conduct was already distorted; the well was poisoned, in effect.

Of course this is a negative explanation for an absence of evidence - and is clearly not a decisive argument! Still, perhaps it helps explain why it seems possible that CW may have 'led' the Inklings meetings, despite there being no specific evidence to confirm this assertion.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have now enjoyably followed all your links within links and caught up on all those posts, but am still not ready to address your 'leader' thesis...

It is fascinating to read the Williams references in the edition of Tolkien's Letters in reverse chronological order (and, for that matter, in chronological order - that,especially with an eye to their interaction with relation to the drafting of The Lord of the Rings).

I tend to (want to) read and reread them all, brooding over them and trying to sift them. One enjoyable, and, for me, profitable instance of this, was in discussion with Father Angelo Mary Geiger earlier this year, in the comments of 17-18 February on his post of 10 February, "Is Tolkien's Fantasy Gnostic?" at his blog, maryvictrix.com

As I say there, my sense now is that "it is impressive how finely and fairly Tolkien distinguishes things in such later letters"! The well-known Letter 252 (to his own son, Michael, not long after the noteworthy Letter 250, also to him) provides an example of this: if he thinks that, due to Williams’s influence, That Hideous Strength ”spoiled” Lewis’s ”trilogy”, Tolkien also judges the novel ”good in itself”.

David Llewellyn Dodds

Anonymous said...

I am still not ready (!), but something I read recently gives some additional interesting possibly comparative 'matter' to examples more widely known, with its details of Williams at work - in a period overlapping his participation in the Inklings circle, Michael Paulus's very lucid, detailed paper, "From a Publisher's Point of View: Charles Williams's Role in Publishing Kierkegaard in English":

digitalcommons.spu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=works

David Llewellyn Dodds