Ragged fantasies
Peter Levi
Charles Williams: An Exploration of his Life and Works Alice Mary Hadfield (OUP £15)
Charles Williams has an oddly high reputation, which puzzled me for 30 years. He worked between the wars for the London branch of the Oxford University Press, and was thought there to be a poet. Auden felt he was a saint, Eliot liked and respected him as a writer and an Anglican, and when the war brought him to Oxford, the crustier Christian English dons admitted him to their inner discussions; they seem seriously to have set him to work to convert the undergraduates to chastity by lecturing on the more virginal kinds of English poem. The educated, or rather over-educated, Christian movement of the 1940s was not much fun. Its major cultural success was jobbing a Canon of Westminster, author of a short epic in Spenserian stanzas on the life of Old King Cole, into the Oxford Chair of Poetry, in order to keep out Maurice Bowra.
For a dead horse, Charles Williams has been very much flogged. The essential clue to understanding the affection and respect people felt for him came to me by chance in a pub, when a friend of mine, who met him once and heard the famous lectures, im- itated his voice. He had a lush, warm cockney accent that made his enthusiasm for Keats and Milton irresistible. It is a pity no book about him tells you this, because it transforms him from a priggish mandarin into the most likeable of men. Even the unreadable Taliesin through Logres all but comes to life recited in the right voice. And one begins to see the essential generosity underlying his wasted lifework as a man of letters. The fact that his friends were too fastidious to talk about his voice says something about the genteel world in which he wandered. In all other respects, this biography is admirable.
He was born in 1886, in pinching lower middle-class conditions and brought up at St Albans. In 1912, at 26, he published his first, awful book of poems. He was rejected for service in the war, married at 31, rather unhappily on the whole, and died in 1945. He was anguished and morally educated by platonic affairs at the office. He published over 30 books of poetry, biography, novels, plays and essays. None of this was hackwork, but it can never now be suc- cessfully revived, because he belonged so intimately to his own time and background. All the same, it is something for a self- educated publisher's drudge to publish books on Bacon, James I, Rochester, Queen Elizabeth, Cranmer and Henry VII. His serious interests included Victorian nar- rative verse, Shakespeare and contem- porary poets; also Milton, Dante, Webster and witchcraft. He admired Hopkins, Lan- dor, Kierkegaard and Evelyn Underhill. The list implies literary vigour but intellec- tual weakness, and his novels, which I fear alone of his works might easily find an audience today, confirm the diagnosis. He was a great friend of Dorothy Sayers. How long ago it seems. How modern Maurice Bowra looks by comparison.
Of course, the comparison is unfair, because Charles Williams had an under- privileged, provincial upbringing. Art, music and architecture meant little to him; even flowers and the weather meant little. As for his poetry, he boasted after marriage that he could 'make a bed in seven minutes, the time he would take to write a sonnet'. From Sunday School teaching and the Debating Societies that flourished in the suburbs, he progressed to the Order of the
The Spectator 3 March 19Golden Dawn, at which he met Yeats. His wife wrote the hymn 'Jesus so lowly', which 84 got into a standard hymn book, but his ovill poems never until late in his life sold so many as 200 copies. One catches a glimP hse. of his warmth and hopelessness when ni- , wife laughs at his 'exuberance in declaMa• Lion of poetry'. He was mildly kinky. He liked to Maic,, one of his platonic girls at the office bell; over, while in absolute silence he strolten, her bottom with the blade of his ceremonial sword, left over from the Golden Dawn., 'She. said she did not like it. He reP_,Iei "This is necessary for the poem', .4" refused to allow the episode to be mentlt. ed. Sometimes he would write on her arm w. ith the tip of a metal paper knife or dal",_, ing needle... After he had finished, n` went on with the conversation as before tilef ritual. He at no time showed any signfh tension, pleasure, climax.' It seems wol'.f recording these remarkable moments.' only for their solemnity and unconsans funniness. I do not think he was spurring of exhausted muse, but his head was fult ragged fantasies in ritual disguises, anci.tll.a. is the trouble with his poetry. His intuitive, sense. of the bodily connection of liter emotions ,is true, I suppose, and the tri°' ridiculous he becomes, the more, in a wa,,Y' one. likes him. The compliance of the one willing girl (who was engaged to sorneon. else) does at least suggest that he had a eer tam magnetism. He lectured a great deal to evenL1 classes, at Tooting and Balharn elsewhere, for most of his life. Hea ,e thrilled by having disciples, and himself to them wholeheartedly. "'" literary critic, he never seems right, but always better than one exP.ects. The earnestness, the heightened emotions; and the hang-ups of those years in that va.., suburban world are hard to recapture no two* Even his Oxford Christian friends, wan were far grander, thought that Betiellis and Eliot were charlatans and that Lejks was no good as a critic. Williams obviousIsY himself 'Why did the Great War poets te'll themselves with outrage at war and detnt both as natural to man as marriage --ye life?' His personal influence seems to ha been simply that of his humanity, interfils ed with ideas that now seem dated oro4
d rewarding. But his literary influence
this biography compels one to 3, belieVe tnd. he had one, cannot have been all that g° t0 In 1939, he was widely expected of declare himself a pacifist, but this was c/r.0., his view. 'Below life and death lay a P'd.. life oshnedevoeryn oCnaelvtaorya.c.k.
founder union in a more significant b.10?_.,
sin and isIt shared and exchanged with the eneMY. t. se important to catch the nuance of .tyweas sentences. They help to explain why that when George Seferis said to Eliot 1,.'ot noawglreedagteeranecessity must have suffered a lot in the Blitz', replied that his worst suffering was the sYtill'is pathy he felt with the enemy. I findand kind of Christianity both repugnana 0. fascinating. It does seem a long time g
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