Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (part seven: Appendix C)

So, getting near the end now, here's the third of the appendices. Again I've given it a post of its own since I consider it a major point. 

This section might well have been called "Williams and Larkin" and provides a glimpse into the way Wms came across to those who were not won over by this eccentric charisma. After all, not everybody who goes to a literary lecture is pleased to find himself or herself to captive audience of a sermon instead.

--JDR

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APPENDIX C: WILLIAMS AS HE APPEARED TO OTHERS

C.S. Lewis compared Charles Williams to an angel, [Note 27]  while T.S. Eliot said meeting him was like being in the presence of a living saint. [Note 28]  I think, in view of the evidence that has emerged through letters and memoirs in the years since his death, some of which has been highlighted in this paper, that this characterization is, in the words of Lewis Carroll, “a sentiment open to doubt.”

Clearly Williams had some sort of personal magnetism that tremendously impressed some people: Lewis, Sayers, Auden, Wain. But whatever it was, it does not survive him; no trace of it carries over onto the printed page of his works. Perhaps it lay in the fact that Williams was filled with a sense that his life was significant, that what happened to him was terribly important. Thoreau may have thought most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, but such was not the case with Charles Williams, who sincerely believed he was the greatest poet since Dante, as well as a major Christian thinker who had found a way to set right what he saw as an imbalance in Christian thought and practice (between what he called ‘the Way of Affirmation’ and ‘the Way of Negation’) dating back almost two millennium. Then too there was his habit of referring to himself using the royal We (“The restoration of Milton criticism to its proper balance is but a side-accident of Our existence; not Our chief affair”), usually reserved for kings, archbishops, or God Himself. [Note 29]  And something of that enormous inner confidence seems to have greatly impressed some who met him, especially those who got drawn in and became part of his Company, while others remained unswayed and simply thought him pleasant company for an afternoon in a pub.

Perhaps Humphrey Havard put his finger on it when he described Williams as ‘a charming man’ (Havard interview 24) who listened to you with complete attention: “you were . . . attracted to him because he was so receptive to what you had to say” (ibid. 35). And just as clearly some people were immune to the spell: Havard himself, who called Williams’s poetry “of an obscurity beyond belief” (Havard, “Philia” 216); Tolkien (whose opinion of Williams changed greatly over the years); [Note 30]  and Warnie Lewis, all of whom enjoyed Williams’s company without having a high opinion of his work.

Lewis rhapsodizes about how rapt Oxford’s undergrads were at Williams’s lectures and how they hung on his every word (e.g. Collected Letters II.345–346), where what he sees as receptive fascination might just as easily be stunned incredulity. As it happens, we have a contemporary account from one of those students which gives a more plausible portrait of Williams than that projected by Lewis. Philip Larkin, who would eventually emerge as the great poet of his generation but was then an Oxford undergraduate, knew and liked Williams as a pub pal but had a very low opinion of his work. In Larkin’s words,

we [Larkin and his friend Bruce Montgomery, author of the famous quote ‘there goes C.S. Lewis; it must be Tuesday’] [Note 31]  had lunch in the King’s Arms with Charles Williams, who drank and wheezed and talked and beamed and produced proofs of his new poems and handed them round. I admire Charles Williams a good deal as a literary critic, and as a ‘Pillar of the Swiss’, as Dylan Thomas would spoonerise, but I don’t give a [expletive] for his poetry. This I endeavoured to conceal. (letter of 19 October 1943 to Kingsley Amis; Larkin Letters 79)

We can add to this contemporary account another from many years later, when Larkin came to read Carpenter’s The Inklings:

I have just got round to The Inklings, as it has come out in pback. Funny lot they were — Chas Wms crazy as a coot, bit gamey too. His lectures were always full of the wildest misquotations; the one

‘Tis chastity, my brother, chastity,


That fortress build by Nature herself

Against infection, and the hand of war . . . †

may be apocryphal, but I have personally heard him declaim ‘Oh, blind, blind, blind, amid the blaze of noon’.†† (letter of 13th March 1981; Larkin Letters 643)

†as Thwaite, editor of Larkin’s collected letters, points out, the first line here comes from Milton’s Comus, while the second and third lines are from Shakespeare’s Richard II; Williams has run them all together as if a single quote from a single source.

††again, Thwaite gives the correct reading as ‘Oh dark, dark, dark,’ again from Milton (Samson Agonistes).

From this emerges the idea of Williams as a somewhat comic figure: a funny little man who constantly misquotes poetry; good company over a drink but a terrible poet. This portrait is so different from that promulgated by Lewis et al. that the question arises whether any evidence exists to support it. And, as it turns out, the answer is an unqualified yes. For one thing, we also have to remember that Williams was not just an outsider at Oxford, a lover of poetry rather than an academician or scholar, but spoke in a Cockney accent, very much out of keeping with the usual Oxford manner. Carpenter briefly mentions “his curious accent” (Carpenter 102) and Lang-Sims “his odd accent” (Lang-Sims 31) but neither elaborates. Lewis calls it “rather a cockney voice” (Collected Letters II 501). E.L. Mascall is more specific in ‘Charles Williams as I Remember Him,’ in which he says as Williams read them the opening lines of Paradise Lost came out something like this:

Of that forbidden tree, ’ose moral tiste


Brort death into the world and all our wow . . .


Sing, ’eavenly muse, that on the sicred top (Mascall 2, emphasis mine)

while Wordsworth, as filtered through Wms, came out as


my heart leapt up when I be’eld a rinebow in the sky (ibid 3)

The accusation of constantly misquoting is curious, given that both Lewis and Eliot lay stress upon Williams’s facility with spontaneous and accurate quotation. In Lewis’s words, “Before he came I had passed for our best conduit of quotations: but he easily outstripped me” (EPCW xi), while Eliot even emphasizes the accuracy of such quotes: “he could declaim long quotations from one or another of his favourite poets, for his memory for poetry was prodigious and accurate” (Eliot, Introduction to All Hallows’ Eve xii; emphasis mine). But support for Larkin’s description of this personality quirk exists as well: in one of his last letters to Lang-Sims Williams quotes Shakespeare but again gets it wrong. [Note 32]

 NOTES

27 “not a feminine angel in the debased tradition of some religious art, but a masculine angel, a spirit burning with intelligence and charity” (EPCW ix).


28 “He seemed to me to approximate, more nearly than any man I have known familiarly, to the saint” (Carpenter 107). That statement was written in 1945 as part of a posthumous tribute (ibid 271) but Eliot had expressed the same opinion during Williams’s lifetime: in a 1940 letter to his wife Williams reports that Eliot had written him saying he thought Williams was “in a direct course towards beatification” (letter of 17 December 1940; Michal 101). 

29 Williams to Raymond Hunt, letter of 29 March 1941, cited in Carpenter (181, 274). Lang-Sims says that Williams used the royal We only when speaking as the head of the Order (Lang-Sims 37), but this is not altogether the case, as any reader of To Michal from Serge will discover. 

30 I have written elsewhere of Tolkien’s and Williams’s friendship, in my essay “‘And Something Yet Remains to be Said’: Tolkien and Williams,” first delivered at Mythcon XVI in Wheaton (July 1985), included in the Proceedings of said conference, and later published in Mythlore #45. 

31 Their reason for seeking out Williams was that each had written a first novel† and each hoped that Williams, who worked for a publisher, might read and recommend it (Larkin Letters 86–87). Montgomery’s The Case of the Gilded Fly was published, under the pseudonym of ‘Edmund Crispin,’ the next year (1944), while Larkin’s Jill was published the year after (1945). It is not known if Williams played any role in their publication, but presumably not, since Larkin makes no mention of any such aid. 

†the famous quote appears in the fourth novel in the series, Swan Song (1947), p. 60 

32 Williams writes, in his letter of 31 August 1944,


Shakespeare defined our proper limits when he wrote ‘no more than with a pure blush thou mayst come off withal’ (Lang-Sims 81)

Glen Cavaliero, in his endnotes to Lang-Sims’s little book (Lang-Sims 89), provides the actual quotation:

Williams is presumably (mis) quoting Shakespeare’s Celia. “. . . love no man in good earnest; nor no further in sport neither, than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst in honour come off again.”(As You Like It, act I, sc. 2, lines 27–29)

More on The Sime

So, back in November I got a piece of original S. H. Sime art:* a small painting on wood of a dark waterfall. At first I thought it was simply a dark scene (much of Sime's work having been in black-and-white, with brilliant usage of darkness), but I've become more and more of the opinion that, while probably intended to be dark, it's now darker than it shd be, due to aging of the varnish (it is, after all, just over a hundred years old).  So we're been talking about getting it professionally cleaned before we have it framed, but with one thing and another I've put it off for going on four months now. Enter Janice, who did some online research that led to her driving me up to Issaquah on Thursday, where we dropped it off at a museum-quality art restorer. I was apprehensive to let it out of my hands, and worried that they might brighten it up too much, spoiling the moody ambiance of the scene. But then I'd have to leave it with someone sometime, be it cleaner or framer. These folks seem to know what they're doing, and their procedure seems sound: clean a small spot (as unobtrusive a one as possible) and e-mail me the results so I can give them the go-ahead or call a halt. If the test result looks promising, I'll give them the go-ahead. Then when they let me know they're done we'll head up either to their main locale in Shoreline (where it turns out the actual restoration work is done) or back to Issaquah, view the results, and make decisions about the frame.**

It shd be great. We'll see.

--JDR


* http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2015/11/my-sime.html

**we cdn't do that Thursday because the appearance of the picture might change enough that what makes a good match now might not with the restored work.

Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (part six: Appendix B)

So, this appendix is short enough that I thought of blending it in with Appendix A or perhaps with Appendix C.  But I decided in the end it's best if it's given a post of its own. That's because the point of this Appendix is to focus attention upon someone who tends to get overlooked, time and time again, in biographies of CW and studies of his work: Raymond Hunt. Without Hunt, much of Wms scholarship wd be impossible: he's the one who preserved the text of Wms' letters (including the famous first letter from CSL to CW, where the name "Inkling" first appears) and much else besides. 


So here's my brief tribute to the man who preserved so much of Wms' work, without whom much of present-day Wms scholarship wd be impossible, or at least sorely impoverished.

--JDR

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APPENDIX B: RAYMOND HUNT

Hunt’s importance to Williams scholarship is so great that I would argue that to fully understand Charles Williams, you have to know who Raymond Hunt was, and the role he was appointed to play in Williams’s story.

Briefly, Lewis considered Williams one of the two or three greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his Taliessin cycle to be one of the greatest works of literature of the century, and Williams agreed with that assessment. Yet despite a few favorable mentions here and there, in the years leading up to his big breakthrough in 1938–39, Williams’s work had notably failed to attract any significant attention—so much so that at one point R.W. Chapman, the Secretary of Oxford University Press (e.g., the man in charge of its Oxford office) half-jokingly asked Humphrey Milford (the Publisher, or head of the London office, and Williams’s immediate boss) “How CAN we put CW over? Shall we try announcing him as the most unsalable of all Oxford authors?” (Hadfield 79; earlier Hadfield had noted that one of his books of poems sold 198 copies; the next, 126 [Hadfield 31]). Given this lack of appreciation for his work, long before Lewis began championing it Williams had taken steps to remedy matters. Most significantly, he appointed his own biographer, Raymond Hunt, who was to produce an authorized critical biography after Williams’s death that would establish Williams’s importance as a major literary figure of his time. Accordingly, Williams passed along to Hunt any letters he received from literary figures, such as Yeats or Eliot. In fact, it is to Hunt that we owe the preservation of Lewis’s first letter to Williams, which contains the first known mention by name of The Inklings, this being one of the testimonials Williams passed along to Hunt for eventual use in the planned biography. [Note 23]

In the event Hunt compiled all the necessary relevant materials —a massive archive of thousands of pages, including a transcription of virtually  every talk Williams ever gave and extensive notes taken at the many lecture- series he taught in London night schools—but in the end failed to produce the biography, possibly because the skills required to collect and preserve an author’s works are different from those needed to write a biography. [Note 24]  However, with the enthusiastic aid of Margaret Douglas, who turned out to be indefatigable in pursuit of Williams material, he preserved a vast amount of material [Note 25]  that would otherwise have been irretrievably lost—including the eight-page [Note 26] letter Answers to C.S. Lewis that Hunt was able to establish Williams had written on December 3rd and/or 4th, 1938 (described by Hunt as “a week-end job”), which comprises pages 3597 through 3606 of Volume XIX of Hunt’s archive (Raymond Hunt to Margaret Douglas, letter of 2 March 1942; Wade CW folder 299).

NOTES

23 Cf. Walter Hooper’s note to Lewis’s letter of 11 March 1936 (Collected Letters II 183), although Hooper there identifies the typist (mistakenly, I believe) as Williams himself.

24 An additional complication might lie in the fact that control of Williams’s estate rested in the hands of his widow, Florence† (‘Michal’), for whom any mention of her husband’s infatuation with Phyllis Jones was anathema:

[T]here were certain areas into which it was perilous to trespass. . . . [S]he felt . . .  the guardianship of her husband’s literary reputation had been stolen from her by certain of his friends . . . : she could be both sorrowful and devastatingly caustic on that topic. . . . [W]hen stung into bitter recollections by the publication of some reference, however delicate, to his other love, she . . . was withering. (Cavaliero 6–7)

[I]t could not be said that a great deal of love was lost between her and the group of people whom she regarded as having connived at his love affair with someone else. . . .  Total rage against Phillida burned in her most, but not all, of the time. When it was not burning it was nonexistent. One never knew with Michal, from one moment to the next, which Michal she was deciding to be. I used to say that, with one exception, Charles was the strangest human being I had ever met in my life: the one exception was Michal. (Lang-Sims 19)

This attitude must have placed Hunt in the unenviable position of being committed to write a biography in which he would either be unable to refer to what Williams believed the most important event in his life—his Beatrician moment of falling in love with Phyllis Jones—or, if he did include this side of Williams’s life, be forbidden by the estate from quoting anything Williams had written.

†Williams had named Florence his sole executrix in his will, dated 3 May 1927.


25 Hunt himself estimated his archive to contain “twenty five million recorded words” (Hunt to Douglas, letter of 2nd March 1942; CW folder 299).


26 The surviving typed versions of this letter at Wheaton† range from seven (MS CW-2, MS CW–415) to eight (MS CW–166) pages and bear varying titles, such as “Notes for C.S. Lewis” (CW–166 and CW–415) or “Answers to Questions from C.S. Lewis” (CW-2). Hunt, who had access to the twenty-page handwritten original,†† titles his transcription Answers to C.S. Lewis, which I have accordingly adopted.

†at least one more copy, which I have not consulted, survives in the Bodleian.


††Hunt to Douglas, letter of 2 March 1942. Cf. Lewis’s account of the “extremely small, loose sheets” upon which Williams liked to compose, which Lewis describes as coming from “a twopenny pad” (Torso 2).