The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski

Author:Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski [Zaleski, Philip & Zaleski, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9780374713799
Google: oTREBQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00PF6QL1G
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

14

LOSS AND GAIN

As the war wound down, so did Charles Williams. “I’m even more of a … prophet? priest? something—more of a Voice and less of a man everywhere except at home,” he wrote Florence in mid-February 1945. “I am always aware of a gulf. My voice—or my style—goes across it, but my heart doesn’t.” He was tired, lonely, unable to escape the disparity between outward eloquence and inward uncertainties.

Once he had rejoiced in Oxford’s intellectual glamour, but now he longed for home. “I wish you and I were spending a cosy evening alone,” he told his wife, expanding this desire a few weeks later into “all I want in this world is you, a bearable place to live, some money & enough distant publicity to bring in the money and be amusing. Nothing more.” He turned to his old acolyte, Alice Hadfield, for long walks on the High Street and long talks in the King’s Arms. He spun for her his dazzling web of words, telling of dreams unrealized, of books on Milton and Wordsworth that in his straitened circumstances he could not afford to write, of hopes for self-improvement that he could not afford to relinquish. Mostly he seemed preoccupied with former days. An old man (old at fifty-eight!), he rehearsed his life, as the ancient do. Some of this was simply exhaustion: in 1944, in addition to his full-time editing post at OUP, he had delivered forty-seven lectures and written part or all of multiple books, including a new novel entitled All Hallows’ Eve, a study of Arthurian legend, and a biography of the Reverend W. H. Flecker, headmaster of Dean Close School in Cheltenham and father of the Georgian poet James Elroy Flecker. The insignificance of this last project tells us how much Williams had thinned out. Great themes had fled him; his prose was now little more than journalism. As All Hallows’ Eve rushed to a conclusion, he declared himself “bitterly disappointed in it.”

He suspected that death was near. “I am, I think, somehow and obscurely warned,” he told Alice, and quoted Wordsworth to the effect that every effort comes “with a weight / Heavy as frost and deep almost as life.” He arranged for Fr. Gervase Mathew to celebrate a Catholic Mass at Blackfriars Hall in St. Giles’, Oxford, “for anyone I have ever loved in any way”—a most unusual request from a devout Anglican, and one with overtones of farewell. In early February, Eliot asked him when the Arthurian book might be ready. Not soon, for, as Williams told Florence, he had made little headway, producing “3000 words … out of 90,000.” Such a huge project was beyond him now. He could still write letters, though, and those to his wife during the late winter and early spring of 1945 overflow with tenderness: “I do love you. I also badly need you”; “Bless you for everything. I love you”; “O sweet, to what a labour you committed us both when you first admired the Silver Stair … you have always been the first and great Influence.

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