THE THIRD KEY: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
(PRIVATE PERSONAE)
And here I think we come up against the third
and most important of all the ‘Keys’ to unlocking the meaning of Williams’s
Arthurian poems: the autobiographical element. The Inklings may have had the
habit (derived no doubt from English public schools) of giving each other
nicknames (‘Tollers,’ ‘Humphrey,’ ‘Hugo’), but Williams (who was not so
fortunately schooled) carried the practice to extremes, assigning a persona to
accompany the name thus bestowed. Thus for him Humphrey Milford (later Sir
Humphrey), his boss at Amen House (the London office of Oxford University
Press), was ‘Caesar’ and, in the Arthurian poems, Arthur himself. Williams’s most
loyal disciple (and one of the few men among the Company), Raymond Hunt, was
‘Dinadin,’ the court’s unofficial jester. Taliessin is Williams himself, and
the love of Williams’s life, Phyllis Jones, whom Williams had earlier dubbed
‘Phillida’ (by which he probably meant ‘the Loved One’) and then ‘Celia’
(‘Heavenly One’), appears successively as Taliessin’s beloved: first as The
Princess of Byzantium (H&K), and Blanchefleur (TtL)/Dindrane (RSS). At first glance it would seem as
if Lang-Sims’s somewhat problematic relationship with Williams is recorded in
“The Queen’s Servant,” the story of the slave-girl sent from Taliessin’s house
against her will, but the chronology argues otherwise: Lang-Sims entered
Williams’s inner circle just a little too late to have inspired the poem in The Region of the Summer Stars, and it
seems overwhelmingly probable that the poem “The Queen’s Servant” refers to
some otherwise unrecorded events with yet another of his unnamed disciples. [Note 16]
Despite this, Lang-Sims’s account offers us a
rare first-name look at how Williams created one of these personae and inserted
it into his Arthurian myth—not (and this is crucial) because the myth had a
lack that was thus filled but instead to bring the events in his daily life and
his myth into parallel, so that the myth could serve as a kind of encoded
autobiography, a roman à clef. In Letters
to Lalage, she traces the various steps by which she was invited to join
The Companions of the Co-inherence, given a name within the myth (“Lalage”),
and assigned a role to play. After several hints that he sees her as a
slave-girl (e.g. 40, 42) and ripe for punishment (ibid), Williams bestows her
with a name in a brief vignette: “Lalage heard her name called and looked up
hastily” (52; letter of 22 December 1943). Her full back-story arrives prefaced
with a quote from Horace: Dulce ridemtam
Lalagam amabo, dulce loquentam (Book I, Ode 22), which means roughly
Sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking, Lalage I will love.
Williams continues
And since he [Horace] was chronologically before Taliessin, I suppose
the King’s poet might have seen a manuscript in Byzantium where, no doubt, in
the suburbs, he—bought? say so in the Myth—the Greek slave Lalage, whose
particular work it was (they say) to see that all the candles in the house were
lit at the proper time . . . though sometimes (they also say) she was lazy and
lay on her pallet-bed or lounged in the court till the water-clocks had told an
hour beyond the proper time; indeed, it is even said that occasionally the Lord
Taliessin, wishing to write verse, found his own room dark—after which (as
might be expected) Lalage spent some time in general discomfort, though no one
lost any joy. However . . .
—CW to LLS, letter of 1 January 1944 (Lang- Sims
53).
It’s disconcerting to see that even as he
creates the character, Williams prepares the ground for yet another slave girl
to get a supposedly well- deserved beating (the ‘general discomfort’ casually
alluded to). [Note
17] Yet it’s of greater interest that Lang-Sims reports
how she thereafter felt under constant pressure to stay ‘in character’
(Lang-Sims 16). Even, apparently, to the extent of not being able to refuse
corporal punishment, since that would be to step out of character as a slave
girl before her lord and Master. And when she finally broke character and
insisted on talking to Williams in her own persona as Lois, not ‘Lalage’, he
promptly ended both relationship and correspondence then and there (Lang-Sims
79–80).
In the end Lalage’s story found its way into
Williams’s poetry only through the sonnets he occasionally sent her alongside
the letters (duly included in Letters to
Lalage), which may represent a kind of halfway house between creating a
persona and fully integrating it into the existing myth. Lalage’s absence from
the published works is probably due less to their estrangement than to his
early death before he had time to write more than a few scattered bits of what
he hoped would be the next book in his Arthurian cycle, to be made up of “the
great narrative poems which are to follow” (Michal
233, letter of 23 November 1944). [Note 18]
Other autobiographical elements abound; so
much so that they dominate the entire myth-cycle. Even Lewis, who was inclined
to take Williams at face value (cf. his various references to Williams’s
perfect marriage), thought one poem autobiographical, calling “The Founding of
the Company” (RSS 34–38) “the most
autobiographical element in the cycle” (Williams
and the Arthuriad 141)—and, incidentally, using it as his model for the
community at St. Anne’s in That Hideous
Strength, with his own series character Ransom, remade into an idealized
portrait of Williams himself, appearing in place of Williams/Taliessin.
Unfortunately so far as understanding his work goes, Williams would sometimes
attempt subterfuge, giving a patently false identification meant to conceal,
not reveal.
One good example of this is when he tells his
wife that he and she are represented in the myth by the characters Bors and his
wife Elayne (Michal 93, 152, 234).
This may be true, so far as it goes, but it is deeply misleading, and no doubt
intentionally so. Sir Bors is a relatively minor character in the myth as
Williams tells it; his defining characteristic is his utter devotion to his
wife. Declaring that everything he does is inspired by her, he endlessly
praises all she does to provide a home, a safe place to return to from the wars
(“Bors to Elayne: The Fish of Broceliande,” “Bors to Elayne: on the King’s
Coins”(TtL 24– 26 & 42–45) [Note 19]—just
as Williams repeatedly laments in his wartime letters home to his wife about
being deprived of all the little comforts of domesticity (which he
extravagantly romanticizes) due to their enforced separation during the war
years.
All this is well enough. And yet it is
self-evident to anyone reading the poems that Taliessin, the central figure in
the entire cycle, is Williams himself—or at least Williams as he saw himself.
This has been universally recognized by everyone from C.S. Lewis (see above) to
Hadfield (“Charles was Taliessin the King’s poet”; 151), from Carpenter’s mild
“Taliessin [...] whose character and role had a relation to Williams’s own idea
of himself” (108) to Lang-Sims’s observation about “Charles’s total
identification of the King’s poet, Taliessin, with himself” (Lang-Sims 38).
Even Williams made this connection elsewhere in his letters to Florence (Michal 247). All in all, Williams’s
purported identification with Bors smacks of cover story designed to allay
suspicions of Florence Williams (which were, we know from Lang- Sims, Phyllis
Jones, and others, thoroughly justified). I cannot avoid a suspicion that
Williams created Bors as the ever-faithful, ever-loving husband in order to
give himself what used to be called ‘plausible deniability.’
The second example is more telling, and
closer to the core of Williams’s myth, its essence. When Lewis queried the
significance of the name P’o-lu, the dark inverse of Byzantium, where on the
far side of the world the Headless Emperor and his cephalopoid minions await
their chance to unleash destruction upon the Empire and drive the Kingdom of
God from this world, Williams’s explanation is a masterpiece of misdirection:
P’o-lu is the Chinese name, of about the period, for the point of Java,—
the extreme point (nobody knew New Zealand then). (Lost Letter, gloss on the
next-to-last section of “The Vision of Empire”; rpt Gnomon 41 and Various Hands
18)
—That is, ‘P’o-lu’ represents not just the
antipodes but ‘the ends of the earth,’ quite literally: the point on the other
side of the world when land ceased and beyond which there was only empty ocean.
Except that it isn’t. Modern maps of Java
show several places named Palau (which seems to be the modern spelling of the
Javanese word for ‘island’): cf. Palau Panaitan, Palau Deli, Palau Tinjil, all
off the western end of Java (not the eastern, or further, end, as we might
expect); one, Palau Sertang, is within sight of Krakatoa. But beyond Java is
not empty sea but, to the east, New Guinea and, to the south, Australia. Only
by heading south and west into the Indian Ocean (that is, back towards
Byzantium rather than away from it) is there emptiness of the sort Williams
prescribes. This might just be geographical carelessness on Williams’s part,
but is instead likely to be more myth-making, as with the moons of Jupiter, so
that in his world there is no Australia or New Guinea or New Zealand, et al.:
the world ends at Java.
Why Java, of all places? Because, Carpenter
reveals (and Hadfield confirms), it was to Java that Phyllis Jones, his
‘Celia’, had gone after her marriage with her new husband, Billie Somervaille
(an oil company executive), in September 1934 (Carpenter 108; Hadfield 117,
129). P’o-lu is thus of crucial, heart-breaking importance to Williams’s life,
and hence was given commensurate significance within the myth: as Hadfield
describes it, “[i]n the far seas [...] the place of chosen, willed and
operative evil, P’o-lu, an island towards Java” (152).
Thus, Williams was sometimes deliberately
obscure, withholding information that would explain a poem, diverting attention
elsewhere, because to do otherwise would reveal his most closely-held secrets.
Yet such information is vital to understanding the poems; the autobiographical
element in this cycle became more important to him than any internal cohesion
of the story. [Note
20] The failure of Williams’s Arthuriad lies not just
in factors like its inversion of the Arthurian story to move the Grail from the
periphery to its core or its remote and unsatisfactory Arthur but in precisely
this: characters do things in the cycle not because that furthers the story
Williams is purportedly trying to tell (and which Lewis was so diligent in
trying to extract from the published poems) but because they are thus acting
out their appointed roles in his private myth, recreating the events of his
life as they should have been. Thus his fictional Blanchefleur does not have an
affair, marry, have children, divorce, and remarry, as did her original, Amen
House librarian Phyllis Jones; she enters a convent, from which she and
Taliessin (the Williams figure) love each other chastely to the end of their
days. The reason so many find Taliessin
through Logres and The Region of the
Summer Stars difficult to read lies not in any inherent inability to
communicate on Williams’s part but in the fact that it is a roman à clef
autobiography with no key provided.
Notes
16 Williams’s first letter
to Lang-Sims is dated September 9th 1943; less than two weeks later, on Sept.
20th, he invites her to join his Order and sends her its Credo on October 5th;
they met for the first time on Thursday October 14th (Lang-Sims 24, 26, 28–30,
31). Yet he mentions proofs for the book having just arrived in a letter to his
wife on October 7th and complains on October 13th that the book is supposed to
be out but he has not yet seen any copies for sale (Michal 171, 226). Finally, he sends Lang-Sims a typescript of the
poems on December 10th and makes no mention of any role she might have played
in inspiring any of its contents, which we would expect him to have done if any
of these poems did owe anything to their relationship (Lang-Sims 48–49). Thus
the time-frame is simply too tight to allow time for Williams to have written a
poem about Lang-Sims, gotten it typed (no doubt by the ever-faithful Douglas),
added it to the typescript, gotten it typeset, and arrive. And, of course, her
break with Williams did not come until much later, in April 1944 (Lang-Sims
80).
17 It may be relevant to
note that Williams once described himself as a sadist, albeit “a cerebralizing
sadist.” He then immediately ordered the person to whom he was writing (who was
not one of his disciples but instead the love of his life, the inspiration for
Blanchfleur/Dindrane) not to look up the word in a dictionary because it would
“give you the wrong idea of me” (Hadfield 104, quoting from an unpublished
letter to Phyllis Jones).†
†#292 of a series
that ran to at least 354; cf. Hadfield 242 and ff.
18 The move towards
longer, more narrative poems had begun with The
Region of the Summer Stars and marks a distinct improvement in Williams’s
verse. The fragments are printed by Dodds, in the section of Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams
devoted to “Poems after Taliessin through
Logres” (Dodds 265–291), which includes only seven poems, most of them
unfinished and fragmentary, and at least one of which (“Divites Dimisit”) is a
draft for a poem that had appeared in The
Region of the Summer Stars (the concluding piece, “The Prayers of the Pope”).
19 We might have expected
Bors to feature more prominently, given that he is one of only three knights
who achieve the Grail (the others being Galahad, whom Williams sees as
godlike,† and Percivale, whom Williams oddly enough makes less important than
his own sister, Taliessin’s beloved). In addition to being an extravagantly
devoted husband, Bors as a soldier plays a role in Arthur’s victories
establishing his realm, albeit a less significant one than that rather
improbably played by Taliessin himself (“The Calling of Arthur,” “Mount Badon”;
TtL 14–15 & 16–18).
Bors appears in
two more poems associated with the cycle but found outside the three published
books. The first, “Bors’ Song of Galahad”, part of the unpublished Advent of Galahad, depicts him instead
as a fond father (Dodds 214–217); Elayne is mentioned (here as Helayne) but
much less prominently. The second, “The Return of Bors,” is a fragment that
breaks off after just fifteen lines, describing Bors’s return from otherworldly
bliss to the hell of Mordred’s war; its placement by Dodds suggests it might be
Williams’s last Arthurian poem (Dodds 291).
†This is signaled
by Williams’s applying to him the term ‘necessity of being,’ in his lexicon an
attribute of the godhead not of created beings (who are ‘contingent’).
20 Williams did not limit
his habit of arranging and re-arranging elements in his work to correlate with
events in his own life, and vice versa, just to his Arthurian cycle. Lyle
Dorsett, in his study of the six biographies of historical figures written by
Williams (of Sir Francis Bacon, James I, the Earl of Rochester, Queen
Elizabeth, Henry VII, and Rev. W.H. Flecker), discovered that Williams was apt
to change biographical facts so that the lives of his subjects reflected the
events of Williams’s own private inner life (Dorsett 36–37, 47). I am grateful
to Dr. Dorsett for sharing his discovery and the Wade Center for providing me
with a copy of his essay.
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