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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This Also is Thou, November 11, 2008
C.S. Lewis once quipped that Charles Williams, at his worst, combined the styles of Dante and P.G. Wodehouse. However, if people ever start reading Williams, it is for Wodehouse, and if they keep reading, it is for Dante. Finally, Williams probably wouldn't see any contradiction between the two. Lewis, in A Preface to Paradise Lost, credits him with reviving Milton criticism. Dorothy L. Sayers was so taken with Williams' lectures on Dante that she taught herself Italian in order to translate the Penguin editions of the Divine Comedy.
What was the magnetism of this man and his message that exercised such a spell in pre-war and wartime Britain? Although Williams was a member of the literary and discussion group known as "The Inklings" that met at the Eagle and Child pub and in Lewis' rooms at Oxford, his writing is very different than that of Lewis or Tolkien. His seven "supernatural" novels are his most accessible writings, but they still appeal to a small coterie of devoted readers.
Two rumours circulate about Williams. One, that he was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult organisation in Britain whose members included Aleister Crowley, the self-styled "Great Beast". Two, that he had some sort of Platonic affair with a fellow employee addressed in his poetry as "Celia". I would hope for an in-depth treatment of the first topic, and a light passing over of the second. Ashenden delves deeply into both. Only long-time Williams readers could guess that the two topics are related, and they are.
On the first topic, Ashenden shows that Williams was actually a member of a different, but related group, A.E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a quasi-Rosicrucian group which placed emphasis on the Kaballa, which he spells Q'abala, combining it with Anglican theology. In this scholarly study, Ashenden recreates the world of pre-war Britain, in which the Victorian inheritances of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and seances were alive and well. In the pre-TV era, reading, and especially poetry held sway. Williams, an editor for Oxford University Press, had a photographic mind, and could recite passages from hundreds of books, particularly of poetry, at the drop of a hat. He also had a vital presence in his live recitals, in which the general remark was that "he made poetry live". He had a lively interest in numerous literary topics from lecturing on Dante to writing reviews of detective fiction. C.S. Lewis immediately marked him as one of the finest minds of his day.
All of this is lost to history, and none of it comes across in his books. Or rather, almost none. It's these inklings (in a different sense) that keep readers reading. Flashes of it are to be seen in his literary reviews collected by Anne Ridler in The Image of the City. Glimpses of it are seen in the novels. Ashenden's book continually sent me to the footnote page, wondering "did Charles Williams really say that?"
Readers of Williams have long waited for a scholarly study of his work, and this is it. It's a hardback, reference book obviously aimed at libraries, and will appeal to diehard readers of the least known "Inkling", as well as those interested in occult history, secret societies, and the literary millieu of pre-war Britain. Readers new to Williams, however, may prefer the more accessible treatments of his writing in Thomas Howard's The Novels of Charles Williams, and Mary McDermott Shideler's The Theology of Romantic Love.
Tolkien was a mediaeval and linguistic scholar. The Lewis of the Narnian Chronicles also wrote on sixteenth century English literature. But it was their ability to translate their insights to a popular audience that made them such widely-read authors. Williams never quite got that knack, but his unique vision has continued to attract a small, but growing readership, and numerous other authors claim his inspiration, among them C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. In this significant contribution to a growing scholarship, Ashenden shows why.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A review by the Archbishop of Canterbury, April 20, 2009
Charles Williams, the odd Inkling
The Archbishop of Canterbury admires a new consideration of the critic, poet and theologian
Rowan Williams
Of the three central and iconic figures of the "Inklings", Charles Williams has always been rather the odd man out in comparison with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. This is not only to do with Tolkien's well-documented antipathy towards Williams; there is a whiff of brimstone in the nostrils of some when they read of his involvement in hermetic or occultist groups, and of his agonized and confused sexuality. The novels are bewildering in style and content (Ashenden quotes C. S. Lewis's acerbic comment that Williams did not always know how to hit the golden mean between Dante and Wodehouse), the late poetry famously obscure, and the critical and theological essays wildly idiosyncratic. Yet it is impossible not to feel that he inhabited a larger world than either Tolkien or Lewis (as the latter acknowledged); and someone who made so deep an impact on both T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, neither of them carelessly generous in their literary or personal estimates of others, surely deserves a second look. Geoffrey Hill has recently stressed the energy and intelligence of Williams's work on the history of English poetry. Theologians continue to circle round the doctrinal work with nervous respect. And the late "Taliesin" poems still excite something of the same uncertain fascination in a surprising variety of readers.
In Charles Williams: Alchemy and integration, Gavin Ashenden sets himself two main tasks and performs them with elegant efficiency. The first is to investigate Williams's involvement in the occult during the 1910s and 20s. Ashenden notes that most of Williams's biographers and commentators have wrongly associated him with the Order of the Golden Dawn - a potent influence on twentieth-century Western occultism. In fact, Williams's association was with the group that broke away from the Golden Dawn under the leadership of A. E. Waite, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, and that attempted to adapt the Continental Rosicrucian tradition to British circumstances, rejecting ritual magic in the strict sense and building more consistently on Jewish and Christian sources.
It is clear that Williams's interest in Kabbalistic vocabulary and speculation derived almost entirely from Waite (Ashenden follows Waite's eccentric spelling, "Q'abalah" - a minor irritant in the book). Although Williams had ceased to be actively involved in the Fellowship after about 1930, there are countless traces of Waite's characteristic ideas and terminology in the novels and the Taliesin cycles. Ashenden argues persuasively that Williams's complex symbolism in these works of the human body as a kind of microcosmic geography is a development from the Kabbalistic schemata that Waite outlines. The Rosicrucian/Kabbalist melange of ideas was a crucial element in what was certainly Williams' most original contribution to twentieth century Christian thought, his theological evaluation of the erotic. And what Ashenden establishes is that this was rooted less in any occult or pseudo-tantric practice than in the bridal imagery of Kabbalist literature as mediated by Waite.
This opens up the second of the questions that Ashenden sets out to clarify. Since the publication of Lois Lang-Sims' recollections of Williams in her autobiography and the more recent publication of some of her correspondence with him, there has been much speculation about what look like elements of ritual sadism in Williams's relationships with at least some women. Balanced assessment is difficult; but what Ashenden makes clear is that the exceptionally tormented and fantasy-ridden relation with Lang-Sims was going on during a period when Williams's general mental balance was insecure. Ashenden has had access to Williams's correspondence with Phyllis Jones, the Oxford University Press secretary who had engaged his affections with dangerous intensity in the 1920s; the correspondence continued for the rest of his life. Again, earlier biographers are corrected: it has been assumed and stated that the friendship had cooled on Williams's side after Phyllis's first marriage, but the letters suggest that his mythologically charged obsession with her changed hardly at all. The point, however, is that these letters illustrate vividly the turmoil of his mind in the early 1940s. His weaving of fantasy patterns in some of what he wrote privately at this time is on the edge of the psychotic, and he was clearly under exceptional mental strain.
What seems to have restored some balance was a kind of "renegotiation" of his marriage. The word is probably misleading; Williams was never literally unfaithful to his wife, but the various intimacies with younger women were not wholly innocent or unproblematic. Yet his correspondence with his wife between 1943 and his death two years later suggests that he had come to terms afresh both with the actual and specific responsibilities proper to marriage, and with the critical and more prosaic responses of his wife to his work and lifestyle. He writes of having been anchored again in an "ordinary" humanity, rather than a near-messianic bardic isolation. Ashenden does not quote it directly, but there is a chilling moment in Lois Lang-Sims's recollections where Williams asks, with obvious self-reference, what kind of relationships are possible for someone who is not really human. It is the furthest point of his inhabiting of the bardic myth, and Ashenden's discussion strongly suggests that it was a point at which he recognized extreme danger and - consciously or not - began to work in a different way at his marriage.
Ashenden, then, tells a story of integration. Williams's obsessive mythologizing of personal sexuality settles privately into a strengthening of his marriage that better reflects the public refining of his theology of "romantic love". And Ashenden's discussions of some of the main fictional works show a parallel movement away from the fascination with spiritual power in its own right towards the developed doctrine of self-giving exchange - though that is not without its ambiguities, as the Lang-Sims correspondence shows. Charles Williams: Alchemy and integration is altogether a very well-crafted book, using a great deal of epistolary and other documentation for the first time and opening up a good many new avenues for discussion as it lays to rest some, if not quite all, of the more lurid versions of his career. It should be the first swallow of a new summer in the study of someone who was, despite the oddities and even grotesqueries, a deeply serious critic, a poet unafraid of major risks, and a theologian of rare creativity.
Rowan Williams is Archbishop of Canterbury and was formerly Lady Margaret Professor Divinity at Oxford. Published in the Times Literary Supplement.
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by Charles Williams
by Glen Cavaliero
by J. R. R. Tolkien
by Charles Williams
