C. S. Lewis on an ideal friend and model of friendship

Give everyone the whole man

C. S. Lewis needs no introduction, but his friend Charles Williams might. He grew up too poor to go to university, which kept him out of the academic career he clearly would have had, and he made his living as an editor at Oxford University Press and a writer of popular histories and literary criticism, and also the six novels, including The Place of the Lion and Descent Into Hell. for which he’s now most known. For the last six years of his life, till he died in 1945, he worked and lived in Oxford, where he became a member of the Inklings and a close friend of Lewis’s. This description of Williams appeared in Lewis’s preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams.

In every circle that he entered, he gave the whole man. I had almost said that he was at everyone’s disposal, but those words would imply a passivity on his part, and all who knew him would find the implication ludicrous. You might as well say that an Atlantic breaker on a Cornish beach is “at the disposal” of all whom it sweeps off their feet. . . .

The highest compliment I ever heard paid to them [Williams’ way of treating others] was by a nun. She said that Mr. Williams’s manners implied a complete offer of intimacy without the slightest imposition of intimacy. He threw down all his own barriers without even implying that you should lower yours. . . .

I said before that he gave to every circle the whole man: all his attention, knowledge, courtesy, charity, were placed at your disposal. It was a natural result of this that you did not find out much about him — certainly not about those parts of him which your own needs or interests did not call into play. A selfless character, perhaps, always has this mysteriousness: and much more so when it is that of a man of genius.

This total offer of himself, but without that tacit claim which so often accompanies such offers, made his friendship the least exacting in the world, and explains the surprising width of his contacts. One kept on discovering that the most unlikely people loved him as well as we did.

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