Breaking the Code
The Image of the City. By Charles Williams. Essays selected by Anne Ridler with a Critical Introduction. (0.U.P., 25s.) R1DLER, in her introduction, has a good deal to say about Williams's poetry, and it is clear that a large part of her claim for him rests
°n it: But the passages quoted only confirm one's Previous impression of the author of Taliessin through Logres. Williams's verse is a solemn Pine, or rote, or ritual. In order to be interested in it, you have to share Williams's own kind of Interest in It: he has nothing else to offer. Mrs. Ridler, and Williams himself (in various notes reprinted here), offer some assistance in break- ing the code, but the antecedent critical question —why bother?—goes begging. Williams in prose is less pretentious and boring .han in his poetry, and these reprinted essays and eviews show that he was a clever man, with !omething to say. But they also show some of the aults which make his verse tedious and his fie- ton unpleasant. They have often an air of "Patronising superiority, a flavour of the chapelle. I hus we find him writing of D. H. Lawrence, 'he vas a man, he was a writer, he might have been 1 leader—had he any idea of precisely where 0 lead or exactly how, had he heard of -the way Affirmation of Images' (italics mine). A little Liter he speaks of Lawrence, in a matter-of-course Way, as 'ignorant of Christianity.' This tone is d_lsPleasing, especially when associated with Christianity; it is too much the tone of one who iS cosily 'inside,' the tone of this comment on the Fourth Gospel : 'it could always be used as a blanket through which the heavenly John cried to the not-nearly-so-heavenly Paul, busily engaged n'n his work of complicating the simple spiritual Gospel, "Hold ! Hold!" Not that Paul did.' The knowingness of that last phrase is representative. The trouble with Williams is that he permitted his cleverness to subserve, and his piety to con- secrate, too many immaturities. There are signs that he was aware of this, for example that tell- tale sentence quoted by Mrs. Ridler from He tame down front Heaven: 'the devil, if he is a fact, has been an indulgence.' This fairly suggests something of the nature of Williams's own in- terest in Evil. Perhaps his games with diablerie, his flirtation with the Order of the Golden Dawn and the like, May be dismissed as harmless r:BbleS. Many greater writers have played with such things; and, in a world full of real and terrible evil, perhaps they don't matter much. But tieY are too closely intertwined with Williams's better preoccupations to be disregarded by a critic who takes him seriously. And they must have a painful effect on the reader who can see that Williams was not only a charming person hut a good man. How could someone with the
s andards Williams set himself have gone any- Where near the ethos of Aleister Crowley?
.Some of the solemn nonsense Williams corn- flits himself to may be ascribed to his curious
=nse of humour, which seems to go on and off t precisely, the wrong places. But so equivocal the habit of his irony that we often cannot niake out whether or not he knows he is being hsurd. 'Those poor despised things, the buttocks
• . are at the bottom of the sober dignity of Idges; the grace of a throned woman; the lerarchical session of the Pope himself reposes Pon them : into even greater images and phrases 'e need not now go.' Mrs. Ridler at one point 3inpares Williams with Montaigne. I wish I )uld feel that what he meant there was the same s what Montaigne meant when he reminds us.
,'11 thus throne du monde ne saiiintes assis gite sus littstre cut'
A large part of this volume is literary criticism. As a critic Williams has similar merits and defects to those of G. K. Chesterton, whose influence is seen clearly in several of the essays. Intelligent and sometimes cogent arguments are interrupted by attitude-striking and paradoxical antics. Williams's jokes dissipate attention instead of concentrating it. Christians should think deeply before recommending. as healthy and morally improving, a writer who so often compels the conviction that he is not really in earnest. not really about the matter in hand. w. \V. ROBSON
Previous page
