--JDR
*MYTHLORE issue 127 (VOl.34 No.1), Fall/Winter 2015, pages 5 - 36)
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THE LOST LETTER:
SEEKING THE KEYS TO WILLIAMS' ARTHURIAD
(Mythlore 127, Fall/Winter 2015, pages 5-36)
The sales of Charles Williams
Leapt up by millions,
When a reviewer surmised
He was only Lewis disguised.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, circa 1943 (Carpenter 187)
The story is well known how, upon the death
of his friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis prepared two
memorial volumes in his friend’s honor. The first was the essay collection Essays Presented to Charles Williams
[1947], a festschrift said to have been already in the works at the time of
Williams’s death, all but one of whose contributing authors were Inklings:
Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield, Gervase Mathew, Warnie Lewis (his first publication),
and Dorothy L. Sayers (the only non-Inkling)—although this near-Inkling-
exclusivity was incidental and not by design, as is shown by the fact that T.S.
Eliot was asked to contribute an essay on Williams’s drama but in the event was
not able to complete it in time. [Note 1] This volume is remembered today primarily as the
first place of publication of Tolkien’s seminal essay On Fairy- stories, just as Williams is primarily remembered for his
association with Lewis (and, to a lesser degree, Tolkien).
The second memorial is the monograph-length Williams and the Arthuriad, based on a
lecture series of the same name delivered by Lewis at Oxford after Williams’s
death, published together with The Figure
of Arthur, Williams’s unfinished prose account of the Grail legend, as Arthurian Torso [1948]. So far as I
know, this is the only time one Inkling taught a course on another Inkling. [Note 2] In this work, Lewis sought both to champion and to
explain Williams’s Arthurian cycle, as depicted in Taliessin Through Logres [1938] and The Region
of the Summer Stars [1944]. Just as Tolkien’s On
Fairy-stories essay is the most valuable part of Essays Presented to Charles Williams, so too the most valuable part
of Williams and the Arthuriad are the
excerpts it contains of a long letter by Williams himself explaining the
symbolism in his poems: the ‘Lost Letter’ of my title. As Lewis tells the
story:
Since I had heard nearly all of [Williams’s Arthurian cycle] read aloud
and expounded by the author and had questioned him closely on his meaning I
felt that I might be able to comment on it, though imperfectly, yet usefully.
His most systematic exposition had been given to me in a long letter which
(with that usual folly which forbids us to remember that our friends can die) I
did not preserve; but fortunately I copied large extracts from it into the
margin of my copy of Taliessin at the relevant passages. (Lewis, Torso 1)
I might say, as an aside, that this is
entirely in keeping with Lewis’s disregard of manuscripts, his own and other
people’s. After all, this is the man who, Tolkien said, destroyed the only copy
of not one but two stories by Tolkien. [Note 3] Given such a straightforward account, it seemed
that Williams’s careful explication of his symbolism was lost forever. Imagine
my surprise, then, when reading Diana Pavlac Glyer’s The Company They Keep and finding among the endnotes (being myself
a reader, and writer, of notes) the following bombshell:
Unbeknownst to Lewis, Williams kept a typescript of this commentary on
his Arthurian work, and he distributed a number of copies of it . . . One of these typescripts is available to
researchers at the Marion E. Wade Center. (Glyer 164n28)
It turns out that Lewis did indeed destroy
the original, but Williams had kept a copy. Its survival seems to be largely
unknown among Lewis and Inkling scholars, although Williams scholars are more
cognizant of the fact. [Note 4]
And thanks to Williams’s disciples Raymond Hunt [Note
5] and especially Margaret Douglas, [Note 6] best known in Tolkien
circles as the woman who typed The Lord
of the Rings (Letters of JRRT
94), today we have, preserved at the Wade, no fewer than three different typescripts
(CW MS-2, CW MS-166, CW MS-415) giving the full text of a document thought
destroyed more than seventy years ago. This ‘lost letter’, I would argue, is
the first of three keys needed to unlock Williams’s poetry, to find our way
through what the Zaleskis, in their new book on the Inklings, call “a nearly
impenetrable thicket of obscurities” (Zaleski 433). And I think the effort
worthwhile because 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 thought so too. Hence
the importance of ‘the lost letter’ to help us see both Williams’s work as he
saw it, or purported to see it, and perhaps also what Lewis saw in it that so
many others have failed to see.
Notes
1 Cf. Lewis’s letters
inviting Eliot to participate (May 17th 1945; Collected Letters Vol. II page 650), agreeing on a choice of topic
(June 1st 1945; II 658), worrying about the non- arrival of his essay (February
28th and March 11th 1946; II 704), and finally the decision to go ahead without
Eliot’s contribution (May 17th 1946; II 710).
2 I am grateful to Janice
Coulter for drawing this point to my attention.
3 The source for this
information is an unpublished ‘MS note by Tolkien’ cited by Carpenter:
Tolkien recalled: ‘He was indeed
accustomed at intervals to throw away papers and books—and at such times he
destroyed those that belonged to other people. He “lost” not only official
documents sent to him by me, but sole MSS. of at least two stories.’ (The Inklings 48 & 268)
4 Glyer cites “Ridler
178” as her source; this alludes to a passage in Williams’s posthumous essay
collection The Image of the City and
other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (1958, pages 178–179), in which Ridler
prefaces her publication of the headnote from the Lost Letter with the
following note (emphasis mine):
Here I add, for the sake of clarity and
with Professor Lewis’s permission, a couple of passages from an exposition of Taliessin through Logres which Williams
made for him. Professor Lewis had written the relevant parts of these into his
own copy of the book, and had destroyed the original. He lamented this, when he
came to write his Commentary, not realizing that Williams had kept and
distributed some copies of it; but in fact all that is essential is to be found
in the Commentary, I merely add Williams’s own summary here for the reader’s
convenience. A.R.
David Llewellyn
Dodds, in his essay in The Rhetoric of
Vision, also quotes from the Lost Letter and devotes a long note to it on
(Dodds, “Co-inherence” 197). The full Letter had been published as far back as
1965 by Glen Cavaliero in the small-press journal Gnomon, but that piece is hardly accessible to Inklings scholars
all these years later. I am grateful to Greval Lindop (author of the
forthcoming biography of Williams) and Stephen Barber (Treasurer of the Charles
Williams Society), Williamsians extraordinaire, for information about this
little-known publication (GL to JDR, email of October 12 2010; SB to JDR, email
of October 13 2010).
Finally much,
but not all, of the contents of the Lost Letter were incorporated into the
Charles Williams Society booklet The
Taliessin Poems of Charles Williams, by Various Hands [1991].
Unfortunately, its presentation there is both incomplete and interwoven with
commentary by others (Hadfield, Ridler, Shuttleworth, et al), so that it is
sometimes difficult to identify which comments come from this particular
source. In any case, such treatment tends to obscure the Lost Letter’s unique
nature of having been written more or less at one sitting at a particular time
and place and in response to specific stimulae (i.e., Lewis’s questions).
5 For more on Raymond Hunt, see Appendix B at the end of this paper.
6 Hadfield, Williams’s biographer, says of Douglas:
A trained typist, she . . . saved armfuls
of his verse by typing it and putting it in order as he showed her. Much that
would have become illegible by age and bad treatment has been saved because she
could ask him to decipher it. (Hadfield 180–181)
[end of Part One]
