Review of Charles Williams: the third Inkling by Grevel Lindop

Grevel Lindop. Charles Williams: the third Inkling. Oxford University Press, 2015. pp xx, 493.

I should say upfront that this is an excellent biography, taking its place as the premier resource on Williams and providing a great deal of new material - including everything I personally most wanted to know about Williams but had previously been unable to discover.

It is well-written, clear, memorable and consistently gripping - such that I read the whole thing, cover to cover, in about thirty hours of nearly solid attention (of course I needed to eat and sleep!)


I have been reading Charles Williams (known as CW), off and on, since 1987 - including everything of a biographical nature that I could lay my hands on. He is one of the most difficult personalities I have ever encountered - and I am still not sure what I think about him.

But this new biography has, at last, answered all my significant questions - I feel that now, for the first time, I have been given everything I need to form a judgement both on the man and his work. But this will probably take a while - because there is a great deal to absorb, assimilate and evaluate. 


One of the first problems about Williams is - why should we be interested in him at all?

I, like most people, came to him via my interest in JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis- specifically Humphrey Carpenter's group biography The Inklings (1979). The problem is that none of CW's work is really a masterpiece - or, at least, not generally regarded as such; and all of the best work is difficult (for modern readers).

Lindop states that his reason for being interested in CW is that he regards Williams as a great poet on the basis of his last two collections Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars. But I do not: I find TtL to be over-edited and artificially-contrived, and while I find TRotSS to be more fluent and effective, I don't much like it.

My reason for interest in CW is his status as a Christian - he was, indeed, one of the four main Christians of the mid-twentieth century Anglican revival; which was the most recent significant Christian revival in England (the others were CS Lewis, TS Eliot and Dorothy L Sayers, who were all friends and very strong admirers of Williams). So, specifically I have the highest regard for some of the novels and his theology.

Williams was also quite a successful playwright on Christian themes - however, he is never performed nowadays (What never? Well... hardly ever), and I personally cannot get much from reading his plays.  He was a critic of good repute - did a great mass of hack work as a biographer, anthologist, writer of introductions and journalistic reviews... Much of this is very good, but not enough to make him stand-out. 

So, I think Williams will survive either as a Christian writer, or as a poet. This biography is essentially of Williams the poet - since Lindop is neither a Christian nor especially interested by Christian theology.


And whether Williams is regarded as primarily a poet or a Christian turns-out to make a very big difference - because Lindop reveals clearly and unambiguously, for the first time, the extent to which Christianity and poetry were at war in Williams's life - and in particular, the extent to which Christianity was sacrificed to poetry.

I may as well get to the point straight away. While I knew that Williams was in love with Phyllis Jones, and that he had a warped kind of interaction with Lois Lang-Sims, and that there were other rather vague rumours about ritual magical-sadism with others - the sheer extent of Williams's activities along these lines was never before clear to me. I did not realize - for example - that CW had had intense love relationships with both his main biographers Anne Ridler and Alice Mary Hadfield.

Lindop quotes extensively from the correspondence between CW and Phyllis Jones, and I never before realized how sexual was the relationship. Indeed, in my interpretation, it was primarily sexual - albeit the sex was not consummated. The relationship indeed seems deeply maladaptive - in that it was a case of mutual dependency of a very common sort: both were mostly unhappy and frequently wretched in the relationship, but neither could find the willpower to break away.

It was essentially addictive - Williams was addicted to the sexual frisson and seductive teasings of the young women - she gave him energy; Phyllis was addicted to the attention and worship of the older, clever, creative man - he made her feel special.

In other words, despite the hundreds of thousands of words of soaring rhetoric, philosophy and theology which Williams associated-with and attributed-to his relationship with Phyllis - the relationship seems to be fundamentally pathological, a delusion, a self-deception, a fake.


(Phyllis comes across as very much the histrionic kind of woman; who is easily bored, has rapid and wide moods swings from ecstasy to abject misery and back, craves attention from men, and uses flirtation and display to get it; who enjoys psychodrama, and especially being competed-for and 'fought over' by multiple men, whom she takes-up and drops, but never lets-go-of - she strings them along for years with promises and hopes.)


To summarize the problem for those of us who most value Charles Williams the Christian: it seems that he strategically used the role of confidante and spiritual adviser for young women to 'groom' them into gratifying his desire for ritualistic petty sadism - he did this in order to become sexually excited, and then he used this excitement to write poetry. This was done, or attempted, time and again with multiple women.


In general, it seems the sadism was, as I said, petty - involving stuff like slapping with pencils and rulers on the palms, back, or buttocks; or some pinching. There was quite a bit of master-slave type play acting, including by letter and telephone; and an authoritarian/ bullying element in his advising and teaching.

In general, it seems that the young women did not much object, and most remained on good terms with him, often very good terms. Of course they may be others we don't know of - indeed I would expect that there would have been many young women who must have been appalled, frightened or disgusted at the turn of conversation from this previously kind and charming and spiritual man; who immediately fled, and left no trace on the records.

Nonetheless, whatever the young women felt personally about being sexually used as poetry-stimulants; there is no doubt that this kind of behaviour was dishonest, manipulative and categorically un-Christian.


The evidence presented by Lindop is consistent with Williams's assertion that he engaged in this ritual sadism with attractive young women mainly in order to write poetry.

And for whatever reason, it worked - it achieved its goal. (Williams thought of it as a magical process, to do with the generation and transformation of sexual into creative energies).

So this was the poetry-Christianity trade-off to which I referred. In order to write poetry, or better poetry; Williams deliberately, strategically, repeatedly behaved in an un-Christian manner.


Lindop also provides new evidence about Williams's Christianity - and I see links between Williams theology and his long-term affair with Phyllis Jones and also the felt-need for ritual sadism.

For the fact is that Williams did not repent these activities - indeed he specifically states at one point that he did not repent the extra-marital affair with Phyllis - that he indeed regarded repentance of this sin as a temptation; one that he had been strong enough to resist.


I had not noticed before, but Williams's theology is one which really has little or no role for repentance, because he is always trying to discern the unity of all experience; and the ways in which apparent evil is actually good.

He did not find this a consoling doctrine, however, because he had very little sense of the reality of an afterlife or Heaven. He often said that all times were simultaneous - but this seemed to mean that suffering (as well as joy) was permanent and inescapable, and there was no realistic hope of things ever being better than they are now.

In sum - there is very little 'good news' about Williams's Christianity - it is bleak, it is a whisker away from utter despair. This, I think, is because he had painted himself into a corner with some of his theological axioms and assumptions which were not necessary.

In a sense, I am surprised that Williams did not suspect that this might mean he had misunderstood Christianity, in some fundamental way - but then, there have been innumerable Christians who have lost sight of the fact that it was a joyful message.


Aside, I tend to think that repentance is almost the essence of Christianity, and this means that there really are things that need to be repented - in other words, sins. For any traditional Christian there was a great deal about Williams's sexual life that was very obviously sinful and needed to be repented - and his refusal to repent it amounts to a denial of its sinfulness, and an implicit assertion of its virtuousness - which amounts to a far worse sin than the original transgression.

I now need to go back and re-read the theology in light of this possibility; the possibility, I mean, that Williams may have been denying the necessity, and perhaps even the value, of repentance. 

So, the revelations of this biography are, I think, potentially very significant for an evaluation of Charles Williams as both a public Christian teacher and as a theologian.


I had not previously properly noticed that Christianity only came to prominence late in Williams's work - from 1936 and the highly successful production of his play Cranmer at the Canterbury festival.

However, back in 1924, Williams had written but not published a book called Romantic Theology in which he first put forward an idea he had been discussing for years - that in some way marriage, or sexual relationships, might be a path to God - a Christian 'way'.

This eventually reached a mature expression in his later work as the Via Affirmativa, Positive theology, or the way of affirmation of images. I regard this as an important and valuable insight - but not as original as Williams thought (or as Lindop believes), since it was a major doctrine of Joseph Smith and had already been put into practice in the Mormon nation-then-state of Deseret/ Utah for many decades.

Also, the working-out of this idea in the draft of Romantic Theology (posthumously published) - in terms of the supposed analogy between the stages of marriage and the events of Christ's life - is (at least to me) massively un-convincing!

But - whatever its imperfections, this has certainly been, for many people - myself included, one of Williams's valuable contributions to Christian theory.


Williams's other distinctive theories included the doctrines of exchange and substitution - and these were formalized in the organization he founded called the Order (or Company) of the Co-Inherence.

Lindop provides us with rich new detail about this, including that Williams was not reluctant to found this group (as had been previously stated), but on the contrary very keen; and he took an active role in organizing the network of substitutions by which one person would take on the burdens of another.

Indeed, this is another rather disillusioning story. The original idea of substitution was one of voluntary and mutual decision - in which person A would offer to take on a worry or fear from person B, and person B would need to agree.

But after a while Williams was telling, or indeed literally ordering, people to take on burdens of others whom they had not met, and knew nothing about; and often the person getting the assistance would not even know about it.

Williams became like a puppet master arranging an intricate web of (claimed) supernatural assistance, with the participants often unaware of what was going-on.


In sum, I found that this biography challenged my view of Williams in multiple ways.

Williams had remarkable qualities as a man. Many regarded him as something like a saint - or if not, then someone of exceptional spiritual insight, and capable of providing great help to many people. All this was what I first heard about Williams, and it remains true.

But most of what I have learned in this detailed biography was negative about Williams. So the more I know about him, the worse Williams seems! How to put this all together, and come to some coherent and also comprehensive overview is not going to be easy - and I am far from accomplishing it!

So, although it was somewhat dismaying to hear of so many horrible new things about CW in such a concentrated burst; I am very grateful to Grevel Lindop for providing the materials which I will need in my task of discernment and synthesis.