Brief introduction to who Williams was and some remarks about his work

Shideler, Mary McDermott

English

SWOSU Digital Commons (Southwestern Oklahoma State University)

Volume 2 Number 2 Article 2 Fall 10-15-1970 Excerpts from a Letter About Charles Williams Mary McDermott Shideler Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore  Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Shideler, Mary McDermott (1970) "Excerpts from a Letter About Charles Williams," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 2 : No. 2 , Article 2. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol2/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact phillip.fitzsimmons@swosu.edu. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico • Postponed to: July 30 – August 2, 2021 Abstract Brief introduction to who Williams was and some remarks about his work. Additional Keywords Williams, Charles—Biography; Williams, Charles—Criticism and interpretation This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol2/iss2/2 EXCERPTS FROM A  LETTER ABOUT CHARLES WILLIAMS.No, I'ill; not surprised that you've just now heard of Charles Williams. His books haven't made the kind of splash that Tolkien's have - anyway, not yet — and most o f the word about him has spread by person­al contacts. The academicians, indeed, have taken him up as a subject for numerous dissertations and books, but that doesn't help much to in­crease his general popularity. It even tends to generate the impression that CW's writings — even his novels ! — are "difficult. "You ask who CW was. He was an editor of the Oxford University Press in London and, during World War II, in Oxford. As a writer and a person he influenced C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, T.S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Christopher Fry, "Edmund Crispin" (Bruce Montgomery), and a number of other notables — but not, apparently, J .R .R . Tolkien, although they knew each other as members of a group called the Inklings, which met weekly for several years to discuss literary and other matters, and to read aloud from whatever they were then working on.What should you read by CW.to start with? Take.your pick: novels, poetry, plays, histories, biographies, literary criticism, essays, book reviews, introductions. His bibliography is formidable. The seven novels are the most easily available and they're all out in paperback (only please don't begin with the first one. Shadows of Ecstasy). I'm  not going to tell you about them: you should have the fun of discovering them for yourself. And they are fun, which his students sometimes forget and Certain of his critics seem not to have noticed. As straight adventure stories, laced with fantasy and witchcraft and visions and supernatural beings and things, they're so absorbing that one critic has warned against reading them on the subway, lest the book carry you past your destination.I beg you, read them for their high entertainment before you begin worry­ing about their Significance (if any), just as you would with science fiction or a detective story.If you don't like whichever book you begin on, for heaven's sake don't feel embarrassed about your reaction, and get all apologetic or defensive, any more than you would (or should) about not liking bananas. And just as nobody can tell whether he will like bananas without trying them, you won't know whether you have a taste for CW without reading some of his work.You can't trust anyone else's recommendation, and it doesn't follow that because you dote on Tolkien and Lewis, you will find CW appealing. This can be said of any writer, I suppose, but with CW it's true to an extreme degree for a reason that I'd like to go into here, although probably I should­n't even bring this up until you have read at least one of his novels or other major works for yourself.A friend of mine once returned a book about CW that she had borrowed from me, with the comment, "While I was reading it, it seemed perfectly clear and wonderfully convincing. But when anybody asked me about it, 1 discovered that 1 couldn't explain what was clear, or why I was convinced, or even what it was about. " I answered, in effect, "Of course. Williams doesn't give you ideas that you can fit into your ordinary understanding of the world. He's showing you a whole new world. So your old language and concepts just aren't adequate when it comes to talking about his work. "Williams' novels opened to my friend an entirely new life — as they did to me ( the story of that is in my new book. Consciousness of Battle. ) Wouldn't you say that one of the essential functions of literature, and per­haps of any art, is to perform that sort of revelatory act — to open windows, raise curtains, tear down walls, transmit a spark from the writer to the reader?But the spark doesn't always jump the gap. You don't see the new world at all. Or you see it and don't like it. Or you like it and try to fit it into your old world, only to find that the two won't mesh. That is one of the troubles which Christians are likely to have with this Christian writer — I've been tempted once or twice to write an article on the thesis that in his novels, CW is not talking about Christianity at all. He's demonstrating what it is like to live in a world where there is no antagon­ism between mind and body, intellect and emotion, "nature" and "super­nature, " but instead a system of interdependent functions whose ultimate purpose is joy.Joy doesn't mean — for CW — happiness or pleasure or comfort, but something at once classic and romantic, highly disciplined and utterly free. All the horror and pain in the world, all its powers and fragile loveliness, belong in the end to joy and can be transmuted into joy because all that exists in the universe belongs to "the order of the Co-inherence, " which CW analyzes in terms of exchange. Each thing has its being — at every level of inorganic, organic, psychological, psychic, and spiritual life — by giving and receiving, ingesting and egesting, blessing and being blessed. And as one of his protagonists says, "There's no need to intro­duce Christ unless you wish. It's a fact of experience."If it's not a fact of your experience, or if you aren't willing or able to suspend your disbelief temporarily, you will probably find CW's novels empty of meaning or uncomfortably disturbing. On the other hand, if through Sybil in The Greater Trumps , or Stanhope in Descent into Hell, or Chloe and Lord Arglay in Many Dimensions, you sec what it might mean to live co-inherently, you will plunge into CW's world with delight, and also a kind of hunger.To apply purely aesthetic or theological standards to CW is like eval­uating the work of Hogarth, or of Picasso in Guernica, without reference to the world they were living in and what they were trying to say about it in their art. They are certainly not above technical criticism but neither6by Mary McDermott Shidelercan they be judged by technical criteria alone. When you meet a saint, do you care whether he is bald, or her grammar is faulty? Thus CW's characterizations have been condemned roundly now and then, but never (so far as I have read the critics) by anyone who comprehended the manner in which he portrayed his characters. They are meant not as allegories or as realistic portraits, but as images, which means that by looking at them, you see through them into another dimension of being, and in that light their "natural dimensions become solid and they take on personal reality. Similarly, a two-dimensional photograph of a sculpture will som e­times give no feeling for it, where a stereoscopic projection reveals its splendor. You can read Williams with one eye, or two. Or with more than two.CW defines a myth as a story used as an image: we look at it in order to see through it. ' Myths are to be judged by whether they are transparent to the reality they are at once revealing and concealing, and this depends in part upon their literary merit. It also depends upon the receptivity of the reader both to myth as such, and to the particular reality that is being conveyed. ■Here CW most notably differs from both Tolkien and Lewis, whose worlds are more nearly compatible with our contemporary world than CW's is. When we enter Middle-earth, or Malacandra and Perelandra, our links with our medieval and classical heritage are reforged, and there­by we respond with fresh insight and grace to the twentieth century. But CW's world has not yet been widely realized in any time. Only here and there in many times and places, individuals and small groups have lived or live co-inherently, some fully conscious of what they are doing and why, others intuitively following the Way of Exchange. CW's vision is profound­ly at odds not only with our scientific-industrial, middle-class culture, but also with our psychedelic and hippie and ethnic sub-cultures — and not obviously different, but in ways that basically transform us. Accepting it, we live from a new root. We may continue to do the same things, but how and why we do them is radically changed.The highest and most sensitive expression of the co-inherent life — according'to CW —  is Christianity when it is rightly understood and believed. The Incarnation is the epitome and fulfillment of all the exchanges, the archetype of the interactions among men, between God and man, and within the Godhead. Because exchange belongs to the essential nature of God, it is at once our grimmest necessity and our supreme delight. Because to love is to live co-inherently, to be in love is to be in some measure a saint —  but don't let me start on CW and romantic love: the last time I let myself go on that subject, it took me five years and up­wards of two hundred pages. Let me know if — and when! — you have any questions, after you've read something by CW — and if you do. . . . ((Editor's Note: Mrs. Shiedler has written a thorough study on the works of Charles Williams, The Theology of Romantic Love, published by Wm. B. Eerdmans. ))ON SEEING AMEN HOUSE DEMOLISHED*(For Charles Williams)I walked gleefully toward Warwick Square with a sense of pique;Behind me flew the fetid pterodactyl Flapping wings to frighten motor-cars.I had come only to see Abelard At work: an Unicorn tipped his Horn and told me he had stepped Back into his books.The House had now begun its Final burn, butterflies were singed And scattered, leaving open a pit In which to transmute him home.An Eagle hovered darkly near Shading time with care;The Lion roared within as Ashes heaped up lost loreNow become a public zoo.—G lenn  E d w a rd  S a d le r*For many years Charles Williams worked at Amen House, Oxford University Press. I have taken the symbol from Williams' The Place of The Lion.to poetize on its demolition.ML.Ce

Excerpts from a Letter About Charles Williams

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Excerpts from a Letter About Charles Williams

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