Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (Part three)

So, this part of my paper had two illustrations, neither of which I'm reposting here because both involve female nudity. The first is Wms' gynecomorphical map, which superimposes a nude female figure over a map of Europe; this forms the endpapers of Taliessin through Logres and has been reprinted many times since (e.g., in David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams). The second illustrates Wms' bondage poem and appeared in Heroes and Kings [p. 45] and so far as I know remained in obscurity until reproduced in Mythlore to accompany my essay.

--JDR

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THE SECOND KEY: THE GYNECOMORPHICAL MAP

(PRIVATE GEOGRAPHY)

And here we come upon one of the great difficulties in reading Williams’s Arthurian poems: when he seems most firmly grounded in the real world he may well be off in what C.S. Lewis called “privatism” (Williams and the Arthuriad 188). Thus references to real-world geography and history and astronomy are usually ways in which the reader gets a grounding in the world of a story, but here taken literally they create nothing but a hopeless muddle. Hence the importance of the ‘Lost Letter’ in explaining some of Williams’s private vocabulary. Another piece that like the Lost Letter is external to the verse-cycle but crucial to understanding it can be found in what J.R.R. Tolkien dubbed Williams’s ‘gynecomorphical’ map (“Our Dear Charles Williams,” line 30). Drawn by staff artist Lynton Lamb, a colleague of Williams’s at Amen House, it formed the endpapers of Taliessin through Logres; Hadfield tells us that it was drawn carefully to Williams’s specifications (“exact direction”) and that both Williams and Lamb were “very pleased at the result” (152).

The concept underlying this map was somewhat more subtle than its crude and unintentionally comical appearance would suggest. One of the cornerstones of Williams’s belief, as important to him as Escape, Recovery, and Consolation were to Tolkien’s thought, was what he called ‘Co-inherence.’ At its root this is the idea that we are all connected, so that all of humanity makes up a larger entity, almost like the Gaia theorem. Think of Donne’s “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” (Donne, Meditation XVII), but taken literally—except that, for Williams, the dead remain part of the communion, able to act and be acted upon (e.g., in the poem “Taliessin on the Death of Virgil” [TtL 31–32] and the novel All Hallows’ Eve, one of whose main characters becomes a ghost just before the story starts).

All Christendom, as Williams conceives it, is a single entity, which he analogized as being parallel to a (female) human body. [Note 11]  And since any complex organism may have specialized cells to deal with specialized functions, he assigned to various parts of the body what he saw as appropriate roles, so that Williams can allegorically use reference to those body parts as code for the thing symbolized. Thus, when he wants to talk about sex, he inserts a reference to the Caucuses, or Caucasian girls; we hear quite a lot in the poems about the rounded bottom or curved base of empire. On those surprisingly rare occasions when he wants to evoke theology (specifically Scholasticism and the great theological colleges of the High Middle Ages), he mentions the breasts of Gaul, I think on the principle that theology is the ‘mother’s milk’ that nourishes faith (from a more puckish allegorist I’d have suspected some private joke about France being the boobs of the empire, but such seems not to be the case with Williams). The hands are crossed at Rome because for Williams the most important function of hands (evoked repeatedly in the poems as “heart-breaking manual acts”) is to perform the sacrament of transforming bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood during the mass. Some of these identifications seem arbitrary—why the right elbow of the Empire is at Cordova, in Moorish Spain (from whence come attacks against the Empire), while the left elbow is at some undifferentiated point up north of the Black Sea, I have no idea, nor why he should have placed the bung-hole of the Empire, the point of defecation, in the great Persian city of Ispahan (Williams seems to have really hated dualism).

The most apparently arbitrary of them all, P’o-lu, court of the Headless Emperor, is also the most revealing, for we have two explanations for it: one, part of Williams’s mythic geography, which he shared with Lewis in the Lost Letter, and which is clearly specious, and the other deeply private, which Williams concealed from Lewis but which is essential to understanding Williams’s mythos; a point to which we’ll return.

If the map with its allegorized human body seems strange, I suspect it’s because here Williams is being strongly influenced by his occult antecedents—and by its very definition occultism is hidden, secret, deliberately impenetrable to the non-initiate. It’s easy to forget that Williams was not just knowledgeable about the occult but an occultist, a practicing ceremonial magician who owned, and used, ritual robes, wand, and ceremonial sword (Hadfield 29, 31, 106). While it is true that he never belonged to the original Golden Dawn (which had splintered in 1903, when Williams was just a teenager, following a power struggle between W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley over control of the group), he was deeply involved in one of its successor groups, A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an explicitly Christianized variant of the Golden Dawn focused more on mysticism than ceremonial magic. [Note 12]  Indeed, Roma King in his notes to Williams’s letters tells us that Williams always referred to Waite’s group as “the Golden Dawn” (To Michal from Serge 276). Williams was a dedicated and devoted long-time member of Waite’s Fellowship; there are even hints in R.A. Gilbert’s biography of Waite (Gilbert, Waite 148–150) that the latter may have had Williams in mind as his ultimate successor, to eventually ascend to become Master of the Fellowship. Instead, to Waite’s dismay Williams left Waite’s group in order to found his own Order, the Companions of the Co-inherence. [Note 13]

Those who have written on Williams have, with the notable exception

of Gavin Ashenden, been reluctant to acknowledge his deep and abiding

interest in the occult. Yet it is self-evident that Williams drew directly on this

knowledge in his Arthurian cycle. For example, he uses astrology, lightly in

“The Coming of Galahad” (cf. TtL 74), “The Ascent of the Spear” (TtL 49), and

“The Calling of Taliessin” (RSS 17), but much more deeply in “Taliessin in the

Rose-Garden” (RSS, esp. 25-28). Kabalism (the Sephirotic tree) informs “The

Death of Palomides” (TtL 78 & 96), while some kind of palm-magic employing

geometric symbology underlies the fifth section of “The Vision of Empire” (TtL 9). [Note 14]

The most prevalent form of magic appearing in the Taliessin poems is a kind of tantric magic. Williams seems particularly drawn to scenes which describe a female initiate stripping naked and being stroked with a hazel rod by the (male) magician, who remains fully clothed. We have two such descriptions of spells being cast in this manner, the first in “The Calling of Taliessin,” in which it is Brisen, Merlin’s sister, who becomes nude while both Merlin and Taliessin remain fully clothed (RSS 17). The scene is echoed by another in “The Queen’s Servant,” in which it is one of the slave girls discussed above who disrobes to provide the nude body and Taliessin, who again remains fully clothed, who performs the spell (RSS 40–41).

What are we to make of this? It’s probably best to admit it up front that there’s every reason to think Williams liked women’s naked bodies (he would not be the first English poet of whom this could be said). They appear not just on the gynecomorphical map (which, it must be pointed out, would have worked just as well, for purposes of symbology, if the human figure there had been fully clothed) but also in “The Queen’s Servant” (RSS 40–41), “The Calling of Taliessin” (RSS 17ff), and “Lamoracke’s Song to Morgause” (Heroes and Kings [H&K] [43]–[49]), the latter of which is illustrated. In particular, Williams shows a disconcerting interest in women’s bottoms. This appears not just in his poetry but carries over into real life: Hadfield tells the story of one disciple, a faithful attendee of Williams’s London night school lectures, whom he persuaded to come to his office before lectures, where he ordered her to bend over so that he could stroke her bottom with a ceremonial sword he kept in the office. [Note 15]  When she objected, he replied “This is necessary for the poem.” This activity continued for several years, even after Williams had shifted his base of operations to Oxford—Hadfield quotes from an unpublished Williams letter in which he orders the same disciple to come to Oxford, specifying the cause: “I am stuck in the poem, come on Friday, tell me the train” (Hadfield 106).

All this might be dismissed as an unreliable narrative if it were the only such account, but the anonymous disciple’s story is not the only such testimony, being echoed by Lois Lang-Sims’ account in Letters to Lalage of her own similar experiences (Lang-Sims 68). Both Lang-Sims and the other woman describe these encounters as “a ritual,” and Lang-Sims explains their purpose: Williams found that he could sublimate sexual stimulation into poetry (69). Thus by summoning young women to his office he could fondle them in private, become aroused, send them away without consummating that arousal, and write.

This pattern is followed closely in “Lamoracke’s Song to Morgause,” perhaps Williams’s most surprising poem, found in the first book in his Arthurian cycle, Heroes and Kings [1930]. This little-known piece describes the bondage play between Arthur’s sister and Percivale’s brother; here is a representative excerpt:

I Lamoracke have bound to-day

the queen my mistress in our play.

   Though she contended, with white hands,

I have driven her courage into flight

  and made her body fast with bands,

doing her arrogance despite,


till the queen, till the queen was fain

to pray to be released again [...]

—Heroes and Kings [43]

I would say ‘and so forth’, but the most significant thing about the poem is that at this point, having stripped the queen naked and tied her down on the bed, helpless, her lover (still fully clothed, as we see from the woodcut) sits down, picks up his harp, and sings a song to his captive audience—a song inspired by her naked body and the foreplay they had just shared, whose consummation is deferred while the knight transforms that energy into composition. In short, here we are seeing in poetic form a ritual we know Williams frequently resorted to himself, albeit in more muted form in real life.

And, lest we think this is all metaphoric, like the naked woman’s body on the gynecomorphic map, Williams chose to have this piece illustrated by a woodcut that shows the fully clad knight bending over the naked bound figure of the queen sprawled upon the bed.

There’s a lot I could say about this poem, and what it says about Williams, but I think the essential point is simply this: I would say that a man may either lay claim to being the great Christian theological poet of his time, writing an epic cycle about the failure of the Second Coming, when Arthur and his court missed their chance to transform the world via the Grail. Or he can write, and publish, illustrated bondage poetry. But not both.

Notes

11 Williams may have been inspired here by Thomas Hardy, who in a passage Williams quotes approvingly† from The Dynasts compares the map of Europe to a human body:

. . . Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. (Poetry at Present 15)

†Williams says of the passage in which these lines occur that it “contains some of the greatest sentences that Hardy has written” (ibid.)

12 Waite is best remembered today, not as the founder of an occult order nor as the best friend of writer Arthur Machen, but for having created the modern tarot deck, best known as the ‘Rider-Waite’ Tarot.

13 Hadfield describes the founding of this Order in 1939, prints its Credo (173–174), and even names several members: Margaret Douglas, Ursula Grundy, Phyllis Potter, Charles Hadfield, Thelma Shuttleworth, and herself (217). Joan Walsh and Anne Renwick may also have been later-day members (Hadfield is vague on this point), while Lois Lang- Sims joined towards the end of Williams’s life and was expelled a few months later (in 1943–44). Note however that this is only the group’s formal (re)organization: it had existed in less formalized form for perhaps a decade and more by this point, very likely from the time he left Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in 1928.

Although this is only speculation on my part, I suspect Williams’s reluctance to formalize the group (described by Hadfield, 173), derived from his wish to maintain absolute power and the greatest possible degree of secrecy. He had learned the lesson of MacGregor Mathers and Westcott, founders of the Golden Dawn, that to create a structure and organization was to risk losing control over said organization. So long as meetings between members were a one-on-one affair arranged entirely by Williams himself, he had absolute power; putting members in touch with one another risked their taking action on their own initiative.

14 Williams writes

the planes of palms, the mid-points of hid cones,


opened in Lombardy, the cone’s point in Rome [...]

Finger-nails, weaklings of seedtime, scratched the soil


till by iron nails the toil was finished in the time of our need,

the sublime circle of the cone’s bottom . . .

the heart-breaking manual acts of the Pope.


If this is difficult, then Williams’s gloss of this passage finds him at his most incoherent:

The cones are more difficult to explain. The delicate and sensitive palms are conceived as full of points from which cones flow down—into? into the substance of our being. The mass of the points makes up the activities and passivities of the hands, for which Rome stands; which is an image of Byzantium as the hands of the whole being. The nails are (i) evolutionary and agricultural (ii) amorous (iii) architectural. The ‘circle’ at the bottom of our substance is Christ; ‘seed-springing surrender’ the Fructiferous Passion. The nails then are the actual nails. (Answers for C.S. Lewis, CW MS-2; rpt Gnomon 41 and in part in Various Hands 15)

15 At first glance, the incredible claim that Williams kept a ceremonial sword in his office would seem to cast doubt on this account. However, R.A. Gilbert’s history of the Golden Dawn explains that while each initiate in that Order was required to consecrate his or her robe, wand, and sword, the ‘sword’ was typically the size of a knife (Gilbert 63). If we assume Waite carried this practice over into his Rectified Order and later Fellowship, then it’s quite possible that Williams’s ‘sword’ was no larger than a letter opener and might easily have been kept in a desk drawer.

Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (Part two)

. . . and here's part two of the article, the section that deals most directly with the Lost Letter.
--JDR

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THE FIRST KEY: ANSWERS TO C. S. LEWIS

(PRIVATE DEFINITIONS)


Comparing the full letter, as preserved by Douglas and Hunt, with those excerpts Lewis chose to preserve and use gives us a window into Lewis’s re-shaping of his friend’s legacy. For one thing, we discover how little of the original letter Lewis thought worth preserving: his quotes and paraphrase total only about 347 words out of an original total of about 3471, or a mere ten percent of the whole. Also, seeing the excerpts used in Williams and the Arthuriad within their original context highlights what aspects of the work Lewis focused attention upon and what aspects he ignored, misunderstood, or suppressed. Unfortunately, the form this Letter took does not readily make for presentation here: Answers to C. S. Lewis is not another Letter to Waldman, setting out at length a private mythology and the connections between its various parts. [Note 7]  Rather, it’s clear that Lewis had written Williams a (lengthy) letter asking specific questions, poem by poem, that had arisen during his close reading of Taliessin through Logres, the middle of Williams’s three Arthurian collections. It’s important to note that this Letter has nothing to say about The Region of the Summer Stars, as yet unwritten, nor The Advent of Galahad, which remained unpublished, nor Heroes and Kings, the earliest of the three published books in the cycle, which curiously enough there is no evidence Lewis ever read. And, as a caveat, Lewis tells us in some cases that a particular note he reproduces is somewhat abridged or recast (e.g., Williams and the Arthuriad 99); this turns out to be quite true and reveals that Lewis is skilled at the art of paraphrase. However, passages Lewis represents as direct quotes are, on comparison with Williams’s original, sometimes revealed to be paraphrase as well. [Note 8]  Thus it’s evident that Lewis valued (some of) the ideas, but not the exact  wording, of Williams’s glosses, and that all passages in Williams and the Arthuriad purportedly in Williams’s own words should be approached with caution by anyone without access to the original Letter: sometimes the reader is getting not Williams directly but Williams rephrased and refocused by Lewis—in the word of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewisified (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 89).

The best way, I think, to convey some sense of Answers to C.S. Lewis is to give a few examples of its contents, both to emphasize its importance as a key to Williams’s thought and to highlight Lewis’s selectiveness. Aside from a general opening summarizing some major points, the bulk of the Letter takes the form of glosses. Each entry opens with a name or phrase and then expounds upon it: sometimes briefly, sometimes at length. Sometimes undue brevity renders the answer opaque, since we do not know the specific question Lewis was asking, merely the poem or passage concerned. Thus, whatever query Lewis posed about the poem “Mount Badon” (Taliessin through Logres [TtL] 16–18), Williams simply replied

Badon: yes.

—providing an answer that is brief, unambiguous, and unhelpful. There are a handful of such entries, whose main value is that they show Lewis did apparently apprehend a good deal of Williams’s symbolism on his own.

Usually, though, Williams expanded upon such affirmations. Thus in the entry on “The Star of Percivale” (TtL 46–47), Williams writes

            yes, the same girl, & the same morning, I think, rather later. Or the next.

Clearly, Lewis had asked if the Caucasian slave-girl who falls in love with Taliessin (the figure in the poem-cycle who stands for Williams himself) in this poem is the same slave-girl whom Taliessin finds sitting in the stocks for striking a fellow servant in the next poem, “The Ascent of the Spear” (TtL 48– 50). The two figures are certainly similar, but there’s no way we could have known for sure it was the same person, since poet-worshipping slave-girls are a recurrent motif moving through Williams’s Arthuriad; they appear in at least two other poems in this book, plus two more out of the eight in Region of the Summer Stars. [Note 9]

Other times, Williams’s answers raise as many difficulties as they solve. Thus, he explains four different layers of symbolism represented by ‘Islam,’ which dominates the southern half of his gynecomorphical map, telling Lewis that

            Islam is (a) Deism (b) Manichaenism (c) heavy morality (d) Islam [Note 10]

—Thus, Williams tells Lewis that his primary meaning for ‘Islam’ is to equate it with Deism; that is, the idea dominant during the 18th-century Enlightenment that our world was made by a remote creator-god who has entirely withdrawn and plays no part in our daily world (as opposed to The Emperor in Byzantium, who in Williams’s myth is God Himself, sending out  ‘logothetes’ [administrators] and ‘nuntii’ [envoys] who are not just messengers but literal angels). This helps explain Palomides’ logical and detached highly rational mind, and his expressing his passion for Iseult in geometrical terms (“The Coming of Palomides,” TtL 33–37). But the equation of Islam and Deism would come as a surprise, to say the least, to most Muslims, or any non- Muslim student of that religion. Furthermore, it seems entirely at odds with the second layer of meaning, since Deism and Manichaenism are starkly different things. That Williams connects Islam with Manichaenism (the idea that our world is a battleground between two great powers, one good and the other evil) explains his otherwise baffling reference in “The Son of Lancelot” (TtL 57) to “iconoclastic heretical licentiates of Manes” preaching war against the Empire (that is, Christendom) from pulpits in Cordova. But again this identification bears no recognizable resemblance at all to real Islam, whose caliphs suppressed Manichaeism wherever they encountered it. The third layer of symbolism, using ‘Islam’ as shorthand for any repressive religion with a strict code of conduct, is more familiar, being alive and well in our time, unfortunately. And finally and fourthly, to paraphrase Dr. Freud, sometimes ‘Islam’ is just Islam—which is good to know, but unhelpful. The fourth meaning is the obvious one any reader would assume, and the third layer is not that hard to guess at simply through reading the poems. But those first and second layers are, I would say, difficult to tease out, and I doubt that it’s possible to combine all four into a coherent whole (though Lewis tries manfully, but I think unsuccessfully, in Williams and the Arthuriad, where he equates Williams’s Islam with ‘all religions that are afraid of matter and afraid of mystery’; 124).

For all practical purposes, I think the lesson we should take from this and similar glosses is that it’s best to think of ‘Islam’ as it appears in Williams’s Arthuriad as a composite fictional religion created to hold up in contrast to his own idealized Christianity, assuming chameleon-like whatever aspect of non- Christianity he needs at the time. The simple truth is that Williams has no interest in actual Islam (elsewhere he praises the crusades, likening them to the Allied liberation of France from Nazi control—The Figure of Arthur 60–61) any more than he cares about the actual history of the Byzantine Empire or Dark-Age Britain. The historical situation represented both by the map accompanying Taliessin through Logres and events in the poems are Williams’s mythic invention: aspects of his subcreated mythic world, and as such do not correspond to real-world history, any more than do the usual knights-in-armor in Malory et al. that we usually associate with the names Lancelot, Guinevere, and Galahad (in any case, a historical Arthur would have lived and died a century before Mohammed proclaimed Islam).

Or, to pick a simpler example, Williams at one point refers to Jupiter and its two moons (“The Coming of Galahad,” TtL 74). Lewis simply remarks in passing “Williams seems to have forgotten that [Jupiter] has four” (171). But it’s far more likely that Williams knew and didn’t care: if the symbolism in the poem requires Jupiter to have only two moons, then in Williams’s world two moons Jupiter will have. Compared with this, it only seems oddly quirky that Williams would identify the Great Red Spot on Jupiter with the Dolorous Blow:

            Pelles [the Fisher-King] bleeds

below Jupiter’s red-pierced planet.

(“Taliessin in the Rose-Garden,” Region of the Summer Stars [RSS] 27)

Or, as Lewis helpfully explicates (a good example of his ability to elucidate Williams’s more obscure lines), “Jupiter, the planet of Kingship [...] becomes, like the wounded King Pelles, another ectype of the Divine King [Christ] wounded on Calvary” (Williams and the Arthuriad 150).

NOTES

7 Tolkien’s lengthy letter to Milton Waldman, reproduced in part as the preface to the second edition of The Silmarillion.

8 Thus Lewis writes on p. 99 of Williams and the Arthuriad

A note in my own hand (but it is either transcribed or abridged from a letter of Williams’s) runs as follows: ‘Broceliande, West of Logres, off Cornwall; both a forest and a sea—a sea-wood. It joins the sea of the Antipodes. Beyond it (at least beyond a certain part of it) is Carbonek; then the open sea; then Sarras. A place of making, home of Nimue. From it the huge shapes emerge, the whole matter of the form of Byzantium—and all this is felt in the beloved.’ 

The passage as Williams wrote it runs as follows; I have highlighted the words and phrases picked up by Lewis in his paraphrase: 

Broceliande is somewhere round Cornwall and Devon, to the west of Logres. It is regard both as a forest and as a sea—a sea-wood; in this sense it joins the sea of the antipodes which lies among its roots. Carbonek is beyond it, or at least beyond a certain part of it; C. stands between B. and the full open sea, beyond which is Sarras. 

Mystically it is the ‘making’ of things. Nimue is the Nature of Creation as the mother of Merlin (Time) and Brisen (Space); she is the source of movement and of distance (p. 77).† She is almost the same state represented by the Emperor’s Court, but more vast, dim, and aboriginal. The huge shapes emerge from B.; and the whole matter of the form of the Empire. And all this is felt in the beloved. (this is reproduced almost verbatim in “Notes on the Arthurian Myth” 179 and in Gnomon 41-42) 

†[JDR Note:] the reference is to the next to last stanza of “The Departure of Merlin” in Taliessin through Logres.
It will be seen that Lewis’s skillful paraphrase clarifies the natures and relative positions of various major sites, while the information about Williams’s idiosyncratic family tree of Nimue as the mother of Merlin and his invention of Brisen, Merlin’s sister, as well as these magical siblings’ embodiment of Space and Time, respectively, appears elsewhere in Lewis’s commentary (see Williams and the Arthuriad 102). 

By contrast, Lewis presents the following as a direct quote from Williams’s letter (Williams and the Arthuriad 178): 

According to Williams’s note ‘For them (i.e. Galahad and his companions) all that was Logres and the Empire has become this flight of doves. Galahad as a symbol of Christ now has necessity of being in himself.’ 

However, what Williams actually wrote is slightly different; again I have highlighted the parts taken verbatim from Williams’s Letter in Lewis’s version: 

[...] from the point of view of the lords, Logres is dissolving behind them (although Bors is to return); all that was Logres & the Empire has become the flight of doves driving the ship on its way; at the point where Galahad is so united with Christ that he has almost a necessity of being in himself; doctrinally heretical, I fear (reprinted with only minor changes in Gnomon 45) 

As will be seen, this is skillful paraphrase, but paraphrase nonetheless, and in this case wrongly presented as direct quotation. And, just as significantly, Lewis has quietly excised Williams’s cheerful admission of heresy.

9 “The Sister of Percivale” (TtL 51–53), where Taliessin enjoys watching the body of a Caucasian slave-girl as she goes about her work drawing water; “The Coming of Galahad” (TtL 69–74), where a favored slave she asks an insightful question which Taliessin evasively answers; “The Departure of Dindrane” (RSS 29–33), in which the slave rejects freedom in order to choose a lifetime of slavery with Taliessin as her master; and “The Queen’s Servant” (Region of the Summer Stars [RSS] 39–42), in which a slave girl (it is unclear whether it is the same or another) is unwillingly freed and forced to leave Taliessin’s service. That Williams romanticized slavery is evident not just from these poems but from his expressing a wish, in a letter to his wife, that he could personally own a slave (To Michal from Serge 220). 

10 Also reproduced almost verbatim in “The Arthurian Myth” 178 and in Gnomon 40, except that the latter substitutes “Theism” for “Deism”; the manuscripts differ as to which reading is correct. 

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More (Part Three: The Second Key) to follow tomorrow -- JDR