The move was fortuitous for Williams. He and
Lewis had become friends, first by mail over mutual admiration of their
writings, and then by rare personal visits. Williams’ evacuation to Oxford made
it possible for him to attend the meetings of the Inklings for at least a short
time. Lewis had become a great admirer of Williams and welcomed him with gusto
to the gatherings of the Inklings.
It is a matter of impressive curiosity to me
that Lewis would be so taken by Williams. I doubt that Lewis impressed easily.
His relationship with Tolkien, which had been very close for many years,
suffered greatly as a result of Lewis’ admiration of Williams, and never fully
recovered. One facet of my curiosity is that both Lewis and Tolkien, as is
evident in their writings, deplored Large Cities and Machinery and
Industrialism, but Williams had quite the opposite view.
Tolkien’s love of the countryside is shown by
his representation of the Shire in The
Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
Trees were so beloved by him that he even made them sentient beings in the
ents. By contrast, the renegade wizard Saruman turned his fortress into a factory
that belched poisonous smoke, and wicked Orcs and others cut down trees at
will. As Tolkien himself wrote somewhere, the Shire was essentially late 19th
century rural England, with its mills and streams and woods and gentle farms.
The closing chapters of Lord of the Rings
show the conquered and occupied Shire turned into a barren industrialized town
with many trees wantonly removed and many of its cottages torn down and
replaced by sterile brick box-type buildings. It is cleansed by having these
presences removed forcibly and quickly, and the Shire returned to its rural
charm.
In a similar way, Lewis loved his cross-country
walks with friends, and such walks feature in his fiction, such as Out of the Silent Planet. Narnia is
clearly a land of villages with many woods and streams. Lantern Waste and The
Wood Between the Worlds are clearly rural and peaceful. He loved his woods and
the small pond a stone’s throw from his home, The Kilns, in Oxford.
By sharp contrast, Williams loved the clank of
machinery and the bustle of buses, banks, and businesses in the large city. For
him London was suggestive of the City of God—more than that, every large city
was in some way a veritable manifestation of the Kingdom of God. In the cities,
people worked in a commotion of exchange of money, goods, and services that not
only suggested but factually were the
Kingdom. As he wrote somewhere—I cannot place where at the moment—one cannot enter
a tea shop and drink a cup of tea without touching the entire world: growers,
printers, truckers, manufacturers, etc. etc., even going far back in history to
the people who first harvested tea and invented crockery, built tables and
chairs, and developed money, etc. etc. To him, everything was the Kingdom, and the City manifested it with
euphoric excitement and joy.
Certainly, in a way both views must be correct.
Putting them together makes for a stunning, eye-opening, revelatory insight into
the Ways of God and the World, and such an insight changed my view of these
Ways for ever.
Williams died during a rather simple surgery in
Oxford. In his short time in Oxford he influenced the population, especially
the student population, far more than many scholars who had lived and taught there
all their lives. If I had to choose between his worldview and Tolkien and Lewis’,
I confess that I’d pick the latter, but Williams has “baptized” my experience
of the City too.
