This is just the central matter of the plot. The other odd happenings, thrown into the story with a total disregard for plausibility, do indeed produce a ‘mad mixture’; and understandably Shadows of Ecstasy at first failed to find a publisher. It is the least successful of Williams’s novels. But it is also the most autobiographical; for what Considine teaches Ingram – that the emotions can be turned inwards to strengthen the personality – was what Williams now believed.
His next novel to be offered for publication was War in Heaven. In it, the theme of power is not yet fully developed. Certainly the central object in the story, the Holy Graal, contains stored supernatural power which may be released by an adept in black magic. But this is not of prime importance in the novel, which is really little more than a jeu d’esprit investigating the possibilities of the supernatural when used in ‘thriller’ form. Not that it is at all humorous or light-weight; the passages describing the magical practices are sometimes singularly and unpleasantly vivid, so that one wonders if Williams is not gratuitously enjoying them beyond the demands of the story. But in general the book’s treatment of the supernatural is more like, say, Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday than anything Williams wrote later, while the character of the Archdeacon bears a marked resemblance to Chesterton’s Father Brown.1
Perhaps because it could be recognised as belonging to an existing genre of novel, War in Heaven eventually (after several rejections) was accepted by Victor Gollancz and published in 1930. Its success was sufficient for three more novels by Williams to be published by the same firm shortly afterwards. He was writing fast now, partly in office hours at the Press. War in Heaven actually brought him some modest royalties, and the prospect of making money by writing encouraged him to continue in the same vein. Not that he had any absurd dream of riches, but there was a constant stream of household bills to be settled. His salary at the Press was not unreasonably low, but he was bad at managing money – he was always buying cups of coffee and glasses of sherry and meals for his friends – and in any case his memories of financial anxiety in his childhood left him in a constant state of worry about his bank-balance. So he went on writing novels specifically for the purpose of making money, and indeed he believed strongly that this was an excellent motive. He declared that it was the stimulus of potential poverty that had produced so many great writers from the ranks of the financially unstable lower middle classes. ‘I saw Shakespeare’, he wrote in a poem,
In a Tube station on the Central London:
He was smoking a pipe:
He had Sax Rohmer’s best novel under his arm
(In a cheap edition)
And the Evening News.
He was reading in the half-detached way one does.
He had just come away from an office
And the notes for The Merchant
Were in his pocket,
Beginning (it was the first line he thought of)
‘Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins’,
But his chief wish was to be earning more money.
This poem shows Williams’s total disregard for the conventional distinctions of time and space, the natural and the supernatural, and his habit of setting extraordinary events against mundane backgrounds. If he wanted to talk about seeing Shakespeare, why should it not happen in a Tube railway station? If he wished to write a novel about the magical properties of the Stone of Suleiman, then let it be set in modern London and let the participants include the Lord Chief Justice and his secretary. (This was Many Dimensions, published in 1931, and including in the character of the secretary Chloe something of a portrait of ‘Celia’.) Or if the plot was to concern the appearance in the material world of ‘huge and mighty forms’, the Platonic archetypes themselves, then let those archetypes appear in the most ordinary landscape that he knew, the Hertfordshire countryside surrounding St Albans. (This was The Place of the Lion, published in the same year.) And, if his subject was to be the Tarot cards and their supernatural relation to the ‘eternal dance’ of the universe, let the terrifying results of the use and abuse of those cards be experienced by a modern middle-class citizen at a house on the South Downs. (This was The Greater Trumps, published in 1932. Shadows of Ecstasy was eventually issued a year later.)
These novels were all concerned with the rightful and wrongful use of power. And here somebody reading them may find himself in some confusion, for Williams’s ideas of right and wrong often seem extremely odd. In Shadows of Ecstasy it is disturbing to find the ‘hero’ Roger Ingram becoming a disciple of the ‘villain’ Considine. In War in Heaven it is at first puzzling to discover that Williams seems to have almost as much enthusiasm for the cause of the black magicians as for the Archdeacon and his friends. And in The Greater Trumps, when Aaron Lee and his grandson Henry use the Tarot cards to raise a great storm by which they hope to murder a man, Williams seems to take sides with them as much as with Coningsby, their intended victim. What has happened to his moral sense?
The answer is that in these novels he was not principally concerned with moral issues. The question of the nature of good and evil occupied his mind, but he did not discuss it in depth in the novels, reserving it for his religious dramas and his theological study He Came Down From Heaven. For the moment he was content to leave it somewhat on one side, and to judge the characters in his novels not by such terms as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but by differentiating their attitudes to the supernatural. Low in the scale come such people as Damaris Tighe in The Place of the Lion, who merely studies the history of supernatural beliefs without considering what she herself should believe. Low too in the scale are those – and there are many in the novels – who desire to use supernatural powers for their own ends; but though this may be evil it does show a proper awareness of those powers. Higher are those persons such as Lord Arglay in Many Dimensions and Sir Bernard Travers in Shadows of Ecstasy who are true agnostics, having decided neither to believe nor to disbelieve but to remain with open minds; and their unruffled scepticism, characteristic of one aspect of Williams himself, in its way admits that belief is possible. Highest of all come those few – there is rarely more than one in each novel – who commit themselves fully to the supernatural, resigning themselves utterly into its hands, even if the result is (as it sometimes is) physical death.
Even this bare summary of some of the elements in the novels shows how unusual they are, a ‘mad mixture’ even by the side of conventional occult or supernatural fiction. Not surprisingly, when they were first published a lot of people found them unreadable, or dismissed them as ‘painfully incredible’ (J. B. Priestley’s comment on The Greater Trumps.) However, some readers admired them greatly. Among these admirers was T. S. Eliot.
‘There are no novels anywhere quite like them,’ wrote Eliot. ‘He makes our everyday world much more exciting, because of the supernatural which he finds always active in it. He really believes in what he is talking about. And seeing all persons and all events in the light of the divine, he shows us a significance, in human beings, human emotions, human events, to which we had been blind.’
Eliot had been told to read War in Heaven and The Place of the Lion by Lady Ottoline Morrell, and shortly afterwards (in 1934) she invited Williams to one of her London tea parties to meet Eliot. ‘I remember a man in spectacles,’ recalled Eliot of the occasion, ‘who appeared to combine a frail physique with exceptional vitality. He appeared completely at ease in surroundings with which he was not yet familiar, and which had intimidated many; and at the same time was modest and unassuming to the point of humility. One retained the impression that he was pleased and grateful for the opportunity of meeting the company, and yet that it was he who had conferred a favour – more than a favour, a kind of benediction, by coming.’1
By the time the two men met, Williams had already published his opinion of Eliot’s poetry. This was in Poetry at Present, a volume (based on his evening classes) of brief critical studies of contemporary poets – or rather, critical enthusiasms,
for typically Williams used the essays to point out strengths rather than to lay bare weaknesses. Although in his own poetry he had as yet shown little interest in post-1914 styles, he found much to admire in modern verse. Indeed, only in one major instance did he fail to show much understanding. ‘I feel a real apology is due to Mr Eliot,’ he wrote, ‘for whose work I profess a sincere and profound respect, though I fail to understand it.’ He declared himself disturbed by what he called Eliot’s ‘unmeaning’, and said: ‘If only we could neglect it, and go back to our sound traditional versifiers!’ Yet of those versifiers he said, referring to Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, ‘Which of them has, in their own way, ever done anything half so good?’
On the basis of this puzzled respect by Williams, and Eliot’s enthusiasm for Williams’s novels, a slightly restrained friendship began between them. They enjoyed each other’s company when they met, which was perhaps once or twice a year; but there was only a limited understanding between them, and their most profound ideas were not shared. They might, in fact, have achieved a real exchange of thought, for as Christian poets their work was largely a matter of related opposites: Williams wrote about such ‘affirmative’ aspects of Christianity as the Dantean approach to romantic love, while Eliot was concerned largely with the ‘negative’ or ascetic rejection of the world. There were indeed certain small influences on each side: Williams showed a few traces of Eliot’s style in some of his later poems, and Eliot by his own admission took the ‘still point of the turning world’ in Burnt Norton from the Fool in Williams’s The Greater Trumps. Perhaps too the moment in The Cocktail Party when Reilly quotes Shelley’s lines about a doppelgänger was suggested by a similar use of those lines in Williams’s Descent into Hell. But such things did not show any fundamental understanding between the two men. Their differences far exceeded any such slight similarities, and they largely failed to communicate with each other.
*
The fame of Williams’s novels was never great, and such as it was it spread slowly. It was early in the nineteen-thirties that R. W. Chambers, Professor of English at London University, read and admired those of them that had been published. Chambers knew C. S. Lewis, and he mentioned to Lewis that he ought to read one of these ‘spiritual shockers’ by Williams. But at first Lewis did not do anything about it.
It was not until February 1936, when he was calling on Nevill Coghill in Exeter College and heard his host eloquently praising The Place of the Lion, that Lewis borrowed Coghill’s copy, took it home, and read it. Perhaps it was fortunate that it was this book rather than any other of the early novels that formed his introduction to Williams’s work. Not only did one of its themes – the necessity of taking philosophical and religious studies utterly seriously and not merely using them as ‘research’ – agree with what Lewis himself often said, but the book lacked any of the unpleasantness which sometimes seemed to be beneath the surface of the black magic and ‘sexual energy’ in War in Heaven and Shadows of Ecstasy.
On 26 February 1936 Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘I have just read what I think a really great book, The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams. It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archetypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel these archetypes start sucking our world back. The lion of strength appears in the world and the strength starts going out of houses and things into him. The archetypal butterfly (enormous) appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him. But every man contains and ought to be able to rule these forces: and there is one man in the book who does. It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of the abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility. In fact it has been a big experience. Do get it, and don’t mind if you don’t understand everything the first time. It deserves reading over and over again. It isn’t often now-a-days you get a Christian fantasy.’
As it happened, Lewis’s Allegory of Love, then provisionally titled The Allegorical Love Poem, was at this time in the hands of the Oxford University Press and awaiting publication. The book was the concern of the academic division of the Press in Oxford, but the London branch had some responsibility for sales, and Humphrey Milford was given a set of proofs so that he could get one of his staff to write a descriptive paragraph about it. He passed these proofs to Williams, who read them through at speed, and was delightedly amazed to find Lewis praising Dante’s ‘noble fusion of sexual and religious experience’.
Williams had no sooner finished reading the book and had written a paragraph praising it than he heard from Milford that Lewis had been saying complimentary things about The Place of the Lion. A day later he received a letter from Lewis saying that he thought the novel remarkable. Williams replied by return of post:
12 March 1936
My dear Mr Lewis,
If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day.
To be exact, I finished on Saturday looking – too hastily – at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem. I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means. As to your letter, what can I say? The public for these novels has been so severely limited (though I admit in some cases passionate) that it gives me very high pleasure to feel that you liked the Lion. You must be in London sometimes. Do let me know and come and have lunch or dinner.
Very gratefully yours,
Charles Williams.
2
‘A tremendous flow of words’
Lewis did not often come to London. Business rarely took him there, and he saw in the capital city little of the significance that Williams perceived, finding it to be mostly chaos where Williams could distinguish order. But he did sometimes have to make a journey up from Oxford, and next time this happened he accepted Williams’s invitation and had lunch with him. He was as fascinated by Williams the man as he had been by The Place of the Lion.
‘He is’, he told Arthur Greeves, ‘of humble origin (there are still traces of Cockney in his voice), ugly as a chimpanzee but so radiant (he emanates more love than any man I have ever known) that as soon as he begins talking he is transfigured and looks like an angel. He sweeps some people quite off their feet and has many disciples. Women find him so attractive that if he were a bad man he could do what he liked either as a Don Juan or a charlatan.’
*
By this time Williams did indeed have ‘disciples’, largely as a result of lecturing for the Evening Institutes. After a bravura performance in the lecture itself, he would lead a discussion which electrified his audience into believing that they themselves were almost as clever and interesting as he was. An inevitable result was that many of them stayed behind to talk to him afterwards; and an inevitable result of that was a long conversation, usually conducted as he sat with his pupils in a tea shop or strolled with them through the London streets – the habit of peripatetic talking had remained with him since the childhood walks with his father. Nor did it end there, for a number of friends he made in this fashion ceased to be contented with a once-weekly meeting at an evening class, and began to search him out at the Press. At Amen House, ‘C. W.’s young women’ (as they were known) soon made up a large proportion of the visitors.
The majority of those who sought him out were indeed young women, and, as Lewis noted, they found him extremely attractive. Not that he was good-looking in a conventional way; one female admirer spoke disparagingly of the shape of his mouth, and of ‘his curious accent and the unpleasin
g timbre of his voice’. But she added: ‘Of all these details I was unconscious. His was a dignity which outsoared absurdity; as his was an attractiveness so potent that it turned the ugliness of his voice and features to no account.’
The source of this potent attraction was hard to define. It was partly the manner of his movements, the way he would sweep himself upstairs, whirl a visitor into a room, and offer a greeting or conduct a farewell with Elizabethan courtesy, bending over the hand of a female friend and kissing it lightly. It was also the intensity of his gaze; and it was the blend of sympathy, as he listened to an outpouring of troubles and personal problems, with command; for he would answer any such outpouring with a firm instruction, holding the friend by the wrist and counting on her fingers as he spoke: ‘Love – obey – pray – play – and be intelligent.’ It was also his lack of self-consciousness, which allowed him to call unblushingly to a young woman friend across a crowded railway carriage: ‘God bless you, child. Under the Protection.’
There was, in other words, a good deal of personal magnetism. And there was also something in his manner that is best described as incantatory. The benediction called across the railway carriage and the rhythmic phrase tapped out on the fingers were manifestations of this; as were his lectures, in which he chanted lines of verse almost as if they were magical formulae. They were not always lines that made any great sense out of context – ‘And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake’ from Paradise Lost and ‘Felt in the blood and felt along the heart’ from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ were among his favourites – but he did not believe that the actual meaning of such lines was especially important. ‘There has been a great deal too much talking of what the poets mean,’ he wrote in The English Poetic Mind. And in another context he said: ‘It isn’t what poetry says, it is what poetry is.’ What poetry was to him was a storehouse of emotional or even supernatural power. He believed he could come into contact with that power by chanting lines of great verse. Like Roger Ingram in Shadows of Ecstasy he ‘submitted his obedience to the authority of Milton and Wordsworth, waiting for the august plenitude of their poetry to be manifested within him’.
The Inklings Page 13