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Introducing Charles Williams
When 174,000 people last year voted for The Lord of the Rings as Britain's Favourite Book, few of them can have been aware that the creator of Gandalf and Saruman wrote much of his fantasy epic in daily dialogue with a graduate of a real-life occult organisation.
Charles Williams (1886-1945), a devout Anglican as well as a former member of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross and a specialist in Tarot and Kabbala, was a close friend of Tolkien during the years of the Second World War, and an even closer friend - almost, indeed, a spiritual adviser - to C. S. Lewis. But whilst Tolkien's fantasy-world has become a global industry, and C. S. Lewis remains a household name, Williams, the third and arguably most complex member of their Oxford literary group, the Inklings, has slipped into obscurity.
Now there are signs that Williams is being reassessed. Recent reprints of his novels, and editions of his letters, in Britain and North America, as well as increasing presence on the internet, indicate that there is a new groundswell of interest in him. A full biography is urgently needed, for its own interest and to further not just Tolkien studies but an understanding of the whole of mid-twentieth-century English writing. He is 'the last magician' both as the last of the magically creative 'Inklings' to receive due attention, and as the last major writer to emerge, as Yeats did before him, from the Western Occult tradition.
THIS NEW BIOGRAPHY BY GREVEL LINDOP, BASED ON A WEALTH OF HITHERTO UNUSED ARCHIVE MATERIAL AND MANY HOURS OF CANDID INTERVIEWS WITH THOSE WHO KNEW WILLIAMS, WILL OPEN UP AN ASTONISHING LIFE TO TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY READERS. THE BIOGRAPHY IS PLANNED FOR PUBLICATION BY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS IN 2008 OR SOON THEREAFTER.
Williams was an extraordinary person, a writer and thinker of unique charisma and complexity, whose life was rich and tumultuous. His relationships span a vital era in English literature. The friend and associate of Yeats and Eliot, the spiritual inspirer of Auden and Dorothy L. Sayers, he was also a valued associate of the young Larkin and Amis. He is in many ways the vital missing 'jigsaw piece' in our picture of twentieth-century literature.
From a poor London background Williams made his way through the literary salons of 1920s London and the hierarchy of the Oxford University Press, to write a series of seven remarkable novels, 'spiritual thrillers' which still have a cult following. He was also the greatest twentieth-century poet to take the Arthurian legends for his theme. C. S. Lewis wrote of his poems, 'They seem to me, both for the soaring and gorgeous novelty of their technique and for their profound wisdom, to be among the two or three most valuable books of verse produced in the century.' A recent critic has stated simply, 'They are the great modern Grail poem.'
Williams also became a major influence on publishing policy and popular taste, piloting such series as the World's Classics and Oxford Standard Authors.
In his early years Williams was an occultist trained in A.E.Waite's 'Fellowship of the Rosy Cross', an organisation descended from Yeats's 'Order of the Golden Dawn'. A lifelong Christian, he challenged the Church's traditional asceticism with a 'theology of romantic love' urging a positive reassessment of sexuality, and emphasising 'Co-inherence', or the interdependence of all people and ultimately of all things in the Divine.
Moving to Oxford with OUP's London office in 1939, Williams quickly became a legendary figure in the wartime University. Despite his lower-middle class background, 'Cockney' accent and lack of a university degree, he was a massively popular lecturer and a close associate of Lewis (who idolised him) and the more sceptical Tolkien. Williams was present for Tolkien's original readings of The Lord of the Rings, and read and discussed the work in detail with him.
His literary friends and contacts were innumerable, including close relationships with T.S.Eliot and Dorothy Sayers, as well as important contacts with W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, Larkin, Amis and many others.
But his private life was fraught with tensions. Alongside his marriage he maintained an agonisingly unconsummated eighteen-year love affair with Phyllis Jones, a fellow-employee at OUP, and acquired a host of disciples - young women in particular - who depended on him for spiritual advice and tried to live by his ideas. He continued (sometimes with their co-operation) to practice magical rituals which he believed were essential to sustain his creativity.
He died suddenly at the age of 58, leaving a spiritual organisation (not so much secret as inconspicuous), The Companions of the Co-Inherence, to practise his teachings.
Williams's life will make an exciting and colourful narrative: inspiring, conflict-ridden and ultimately tinged with tragedy. He was such a remarkable character that many people who knew him recorded their impressions vividly, or have already provided splendid interview material. All agree that he changed their lives. Rich and largely untapped archive sources are available. Williams was a prolific, stylish and eloquent letter-writer. He was also a witty and incisive phrase-maker. Quoting his words will be a joy, and this is a book which will glitter with fun and intelligence, reflecting Williams's enthusiasm, oddity and rapier-sharp intellect.
Williams is ripe for rediscovery, both in his own right and as a central figure in the modern revival of myth, magic and fantasy. His profound and original religious ideas will have a wide appeal to those interested in spiritual matters in the context of both traditional and 'New Age' thought. Williams's novels - in all their exciting strangeness - have the potential to captivate a new generation of readers; his poetry and criticism are brilliant and important.
Williams is an essential and hitherto overlooked figure, vital for a full understanding not only of his fellow-writers Lewis and Tolkien but also of twentieth-century literature and thought. Potential audiences include enthusiasts for JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and the Inklings; anyone who enjoys lively literary biography with a rich cast of characters set in the literary and publishing worlds of London and Oxford; students and academics interested in twentieth-century poetry; enthusiasts for the Arthurian legends; those with an interest in spiritual matters and the occult; and Christians, especially in the USA, where Williams's theology is on college reading-lists and his novels have a cult following.
PRELUDE
Oxford, 5 February 1940. Monday morning in the Divinity School, Oxford University's splendid fifteenth-century Gothic lecture hall. The stone-carved room, with its magnificent fan-vaulted ceiling, is crammed with students, the mixed student body of wartime Oxford: a larger proportion than usual of young women; young men straight from school, many of them awaiting call up; a few in uniform, who will be training later in the day. Britain has been at war with Nazi Germany for five months: Hitler has recently invaded Poland and Finland, and is expected soon to attack France.
But it is not news from the war that causes the buzz of suppressed excitement pervading the room. Usually the audience for the second lecture of a series is smaller than for the first. This time it is larger: many who were here last week have brought their friends, to see and hear something out of the ordinary. Most are muffled up in overcoats and scarves against the chill of the poorly-heated building.
As the nearby clock of St Mary's Church strikes eleven, three men sweep into the hall and make their way up the central aisle between the chairs. At left and right, their black gowns billowing behind them, are two well-known characters, leading members of the English Faculty: on one side, the domed forehead and burly physique of C.S.Lewis, Fellow in English at Magdalen College; on the other - slighter, smaller, with down-turned mouth and piercing eyes - J.R.R.Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. Between them strides an unlikely figure. Tall and angular, gownless, in a blueish-grey business suit and round spectacles, darting quick glances around the room, he seems as full of anticipation as the students, and when he mounts the platform, leaving his companions to find their seats in the front row, there is a glint of something like mischief in his eyes as he surveys his audience.
This is Charles Williams, the new Honorary Lecturer in English Literature. He clutches a rolled-up sheaf of papers in one hand but having set them on the lectern he never looks at them again. He launches into his lecture, which is on Milton's poetic masque Comus - the second of an entire term's course on Milton's works - and those already startled by his unacademic appearance are further shocked by his voice: not the usual refined 'Oxford' accent, but a sharp, plebeian enunciation. Almost Cockney, and certainly some sort of 'London' accent, it comes close to grating on the ear. But within a minute or two any resistance aroused by these unorthodox tones melts away.
Williams speaks as if Comus were of immediate and vital importance to himself and to every member of the audience, and needs urgently to be discussed and understood. He seems to know Comus - and indeed all of Milton's poetry - by heart, and plucks apt illustrations and quotations out of the air as he goes. He charms the audience with his wit, his irony, his passionate urgency. He strides about the stage, gesturing with his tense but expressive hands, clutching for the exact word and then firing it off with a piercing look at this or that student. He seems to speak out of the side of his mouth, and this - together with the harsh accent - gives his words a curious personal intensity. Reciting poetry, he makes it a hypnotic incantation but also a sensuous delight, enjoying it as if the sounds and rhythms of the words can be savoured like nectar, and sure that the audience will relish them too.
But he also understands the students' resistances, their scepticism, their doubts. Comus, he explains, is about chastity. A virtue undervalued in the present age but of the utmost importance, which we may choose to reject - that is our right - but which we must first understand. His hearers are spellbound. They sense that they are listening to someone who knows (and means) what he says; someone who has lived poetry, who has it in his blood and bones, and who can speak to them also about vital issues in their lives. The beauty of Milton's verse and the sacred loveliness of virginity become, for an hour, the most important things in the world.
Then, far too quickly, time is up; Williams has indicated the theme of next week's lecture and is already off the platform, with a quick conspiratorial smile to his friends in the front row, and is making his way briskly out of the room, leaving his audience dazed, exhilarated, inspired. Most leave the lecture determined to read Comus as soon as possible. Some are already planning to persuade their colleges - by hook or by crook - to let them have Charles Williams as their tutor, next term if not this.
Even those few who have remained sceptical, or been antagonised by the lecture, cannot help being impressed. For the reticent, ruminative Tolkien, Williams's platform manner is perhaps rather too histrionic. Impressed by his friend's intelligence and range of knowledge, he nonetheless decides to attend the lectures no further (after all, very little poetry worth the name has been written in England since the Norman Conquest). Lewis, on the other hand, has no doubts. 'Simply as criticism', he will later recall, 'it was superb because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about "the sage and serious doctrine of virginity"'. Indeed, 'That beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great mediaeval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching wisdom.'
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That wisdom was hard-won and fraught with bitter paradox. The charismatic
lecturer who celebrated chastity bore the emotional scars of a painfully unconsummated fourteen-year love-affair which had brought his marriage close to breaking-point.
With an encyclopaedic knowledge of English poetry and unrivalled critical insight, he had no university degree (as his lack of an academic gown indicated) and could lecture at Oxford only because war had called away so many of the usual staff.
A brilliant Anglican theologian and interpreter of Christian doctrine, he was a trained occultist who continued to practise what can only be called magical rituals with a sexual and even sadistic tinge to them. At Oxford he was an anomaly: a restless Londoner who found 'Oxford, however nice, still a kind of parody of London'; a worldly-wise publisher with a good head for business, more at home with a cigarette and a sandwich in a Ludgate Hill wine bar than with the pipesmoke and claret of an Oxford common-room. He was beginning to be recognised as an important poet with the first volume of a brilliantly original cycle of Arthurian poems whose style would influence the Four Quartets of his friend T.S.Eliot. And a little over five years later, at the height of his reputation and influence, he would die, to be celebrated briefly and then, for the most part, forgotten.
Who was Charles Williams, this man who changed so many people's lives - often at a single meeting - and yet has largely disappeared from our maps of twentieth-century writing? It will be the task to this book to find out, to explore a literary life rich and strange almost beyond belief.
GREVEL LINDOP IS ANXIOUS TO CONTACT ANYONE WHO MET CHARLES WILLIAMS. IF YOU KNEW WILLIAMS, OR MET HIM EVEN BRIEFLY, OR IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO DID, PLEASE EMAIL GREVEL AT THE CONTACT ADDRESS GIVEN ON THIS WEBSITE.
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