The Spirit of Charles Williams

by GEOFFREY PARSONS

I

THE rich and strange soul of Charles Williams departed his body at Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, in 1945. It may seem odd to accept so confidently the persistence of a spirit. But however vague one’s faith or philosophy may be in general terms, the devoted readers of the Williams volumes — of whom I am one — could hardly do otherwise. He not only accepted immortality as an obvious fact; he portrayed its mysteries in such vivid detail as to make his own continuity seem somehow inevitable. As C. S. Lewis, the British author, one of his intimate friends, wrote: “No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed.”

The Williams career has left an extraordinary saga behind it. The descriptions of his face stress its homeliness. Yet when talking, in conversation or lecturing to groups, he was as if transfigured. His best friends gave up the task of definition and agreed that he looked half monkey, half angel. He began as a cockney, with a limited education; he ended as a lecturer at Oxford University with an honorary M.A. degree.

Witchcraft held a profound interest for him; his book on the subject ranks as an authority; and in his novels he relied heavily on the dark processes of the Magi — sometimes to the bewilderment of his readers. Evil was so intensely real to him that it sometimes seems as if he were more interested in evil than good. But he was throughout a strong upholder of the Anglican Church and a follower of the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

For all his mysticism, his sense of humor never deserted him. Fun and reverence — perhaps St. Francis of Assisi was his spiritual ancestor — held no contradiction for him. In his most skillful narrative passages, when he is, in effect, walking the reader ever so gently into the presence of the gravest religious concepts, he can always pause for a chuckle. Perhaps the word mystic ought not to be used of him. It implies to many a contemplative rapture which has no relation to the incredibly full years Williams himself lived, or to the active sharing with one’s fellows that was the heart of his faith.

Oddest of all the facts in the record is the divergence between British and American reactions. In England his novels rapidly gained a large and lasting audience and a personal following which included a group of distinguished friends, among them Dorothy Sayers, W. H. Auden, Barbara Ward, and T. S. Eliot. All this happened in the 1930’s and it was not until 1948 that a serious effort was made to present Williams to the American public, with the publication of All Hallows’ Eve (Pellegrini & Cudahy). The publishers followed with Descent into Hell in the spring of 1949, and with War in Heaven and Many Dimensions this autumn. All Hallows’ Eve won reviews that sounded extravagant in their enthusiasm, and has had a steady sale. It is obviously too soon to tell to what extent this country will follow the British precedent.

One source of enthusiasm is, of course, lacking. That is the extraordinary personality of Williams himself. It is a fair question to wonder just how much of his immediate fame in his home country was the product of his spoken word and his inspiring presence. He was loved, almost revered, as a sort of prophet by a considerable group. He leetured eloquently and inspiringly — on literature, on religion. He had a rare talent for communicating his faith, his excitement, to his audience. He was equipped with a fantastic memory and could recite at length from books under discussion. He was an even greater talker and companion among his friends. Here are a few sentences of personal description written by C. S. Lewis for the volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams, published as a memorial after his death: —

In appearance he was tall, slim, and straight as a boy, though grey-haired. . . . One of the most characteristic things about him was his -walk. I have often, from the top of a bus, seen him walking below me. The face and hair being then invisible, he might have passed for a boy in the early twenties, and perhaps a boy of some period when swords were worn. There was something of recklessness, something even of panache, in his gait. . . . He always carried his head in the air. When he lectured, wearing his gown, his presence was one of the stateliest I have ever seen. . . . He gave to every circle the whole man; all his attention, knowledge, courtesy, charity, were placed at your disposal. . . . One kept on discovering that the most unlikely people loved him as well as we did.

An amazing person, surely, was this writer and talker, equally at home with the finest minds and the simplest; in his person he must have been a creature of extraordinary power. Certainly no one could ask for more loyal friends than he left behind him.

2

T. S. ELIOT wrote a moving and persuasive introduction to the American edition of All Hallows’ Eve. But such material, however rich and vivid, belongs rather with the account of Williams the man — that must certainly be written some day — than with the creative achievement. For the general reader in this country, the question is of the books.

There are thirty-eight of them. Williams sometimes wrote to live, to support a family, a wife and a son. He turned his hand to everything — potboilers in the field of history and literature; books of religious devotion (composed of quotations from the writings of the Christian Fathers, with a bit of Eliot and Kierkegaard thrown in) and a number of other anthologies. But mostly he wrote because he had to, for fun, from sheer exuberance, or with exalted purpose.

Poetry concerned him from the beginning — his first book, published in 1912 when he was twentysix years old, was a volume of poems. In his last years he returned to verse, writing two volumes on the Arthurian legend. Here had been a constant interest of his mind. Perhaps his Welsh ancestry kept “the matter of Britain” alive in the background of his imagination however busy his days. The result is eloquent but difficult verse — the subject of much dispute among his friends.

His critical work is considerable and important. His late volume on Dante, The Figure of Beatrice, sums up much of his religious thought and ranks high among the interpretations of the Convivio and of the poems. In addition stand three extraordinary religious volumes, He Came Down from Heaven, Descent of the Dove, and Witchcraft. Perhaps never have the essentials of the Christian faith been stated with so much imagination and wit as in the first two volumes. If the colloquialism of the style now and then obscures the sense and confuses the current, the charge is one that lies against much of his work. For a clear, flowing prose and sustained interest, Witchcraft, is one of his best.

This amazing mass of creation would seem to be enough for any man who worked daily as an editor with the Oxford University Press for thirty-seven years. Yet in addition he wrote the seven novels upon which his widest claim to popularity must rest. They gained greatly in form as the years passed, but throughout there is the sense of an uncontrolled power, as of a spring that cannot but overflow in all directions. Imperfection is inevitable in such production. The writing is uneven. There are flaws of plot; the characters are too often lay figures. The end of a tale never seems to interest him. But, on the way, there is endless thrill and excitement; and on the way, in my judgment, the reader will happen upon some of the most noble and moving pages in English literature. If the voyage is at times difficult, the rewards are beyond price.

Five of the novels appeared in four years, from 1930 to 1933. Several of these are frankly thrillers — supernatural thrillers, they have been tagged. As a matter of fact Williams lived and breathed in a world that knew no sharp dividing line between natural events and spiritual events. If anything — perhaps surely —the latter were the more real to him. Therefore when he took up the writing of fiction his plots functioned in both realms.

Let us take his second novel, Many Dimensions, as an example. Probably it is the best of all to begin with since its theme is simple and the plot moves amid much tenseness to its appointed end. It is a thriller but there are frequent overtones which look forward to his greater novels. The center of the tale is plain magic — the appearance in London out of the Near East of a most ancient stone which, being a part of the first matter from which the world was created, can still control space and time. By touching it and willing, one can move instantly where one desires. There are an appealing heroine and a delightful Chief Justice, both ranking among the all too few real characters that Williams brought alive. There are evil men who would use this appalling power selfishly. Stated thus crudely , the theme surpasses credibility. The skill of Williams carries the reader along so gradually, so easily, that he can hardly help believing. Incidentally, there should he an exciting motion picture in the material of this volume.

The culmination came six years later in Descent, into Hell, the masterpiece of the series. Here the skill is at its peak; and while the gravity of the thought is at times overwhelming, the interplay of character between the hero and the heroine is brilliant. There are difficult passages and puzzling episodes. But the reader who will commit himself trustingly to the Williams leadership will experience a climax that has few parallels in any art outside, perhaps, the glory of a great cathedral. The two central themes of the book are common enough in Christianity and in current thought — the one that all men are, as plain fact, united in a bond of fellowship; and the other that time is an appearance, all time really being contained in each second. The ingenuity with which Williams enacts these concepts before the reader’s eyes is a miracle of the creative imagination.

One other of the novels seems to me to rank close after the Descent. That is The Place of the Lion, which was published in the same year as Many Dimensions. While the words of Plato are never used, Williams here built a plot around the concept of ideas as existing apart from their created expression. By catastrophic chance, at a certain spot in England, the process is reversed and the particulars begin suddenly to revert toward their origins. There is first a mangy lion, who flies aloft all golden; butterflies follow by the thousand, larger and more wonderful than any butterflies ever seen before;on a different plane, terrific human struggles begin. Again, the theme sounds beyond acceptance; perhaps at times the terror overwhelms the understanding; but the totality of the conception plainly deserves the word great. The writing is Williams at his best.

The other novels are all highly readable but they are of distinctly lesser stature. His first try, War in Heaven, was built around the appearance of the Grail in a quiet country church in England, to the disturbance of many lives. The Greater Trumps has an especial interest for Eliot readers since it concerns the ancient Tarot pack of cards which figures among the many puzzling items in The Waste Land. The Hanged Man is no mere piece of cardboard in this exciting plot. The result is a good, readable tale with much learning, no small drama, and one most definite and significant character. Shadows of Ecstasy was Williams’s favorite, according to report; it has a highly original plot and a basic idea concerning the sources of human strength which is as modern as Jung and as ancient as Christianity.

It is perhaps unfair to leave All Hallows’ Eve as a postscript since it was the author’s most mature work, published in England in 1944. But magic seizes the book midway and the result is both incredulity and horror. However, the volume is well worth the knowing by anyone who is interested in the Williams universe. The most notable achievement of the author, as if in anticipation of his fate in the coming year, is the poignant and convincing picture of life hereafter.

When Williams died the Oxford University Press published a memorial to him. At its beginning is an italic foreword, anonymous, which strikes me as the perfect summary of his complex career. It begins and ends as follows: —

Of many poets, perhaps of most, it can be said that what is best in them is distilled in their poetry; that to know them as persons is to suffer disillusion. With Charles Williams it was otherwise. . . . Though he associated with and enjoyed the best minds of two great universities, he was not in an important sense educated by these contacts. He came to them as already the master of seemingly unbounded stores of innate knowledge and, more significantly, of the innate awareness which is at the back of knowledge and accessible only to the poets and the saints. . . . If he was a mystic and an ascetic — as he certainly was, though he would have laughed down anyone who called him that — he was also no immaterialist. He enjoyed the world, because he enjoyed the universe; he rejoiced in every manner of creature, because he rejoiced in the Creator: he was therefore as comfortable and comforting with the unlettered as with the learned, and infinitely courteous with all. While the world may long remember him for what he wrote, his colleagues and other friends cherish first the indelible memory of what he was.

For epitaph there is a line from Shakespeare which was suggested by a critic in the London Tablet. The writer, David Jones, was reviewing the final Williams book on the Arthurian period. Consider that Shakespeare was Williams’s great hero and that the legends stirred his deepest nature. The line was spoken by Mistress Quickly of Falstaff at his death: “ He’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom.”