Feature
What About Charles Williams?
The Secret of the Enigmatic Inkling Revealed
Charles Williams’s name always seems to flit about the edges of the Tolkien/Lewis world. Everyone who knows anything about these gentlemen beyond Middle-earth and Narnia knows that they met regularly at The Bird and Baby to drink beer, smoke, talk, and read their “work in progress” to each other, and that Charles Williams was perhaps the most animated (or agitated) one of the group. Others were there—Hugo Dyson, Lord David Cecil, Dr. Havard, and so on—but the Three were the core of the thing.
An Insider’s Name
Nevertheless, Williams’s name is strictly a name for insiders, so to speak. Lots of people vaguely know the name, and many have had a go at reading one or more of his novels. But the testimony here is frequently, “I couldn’t make head or tail of it all.” The testimony becomes a wail of despair when Williams’s poetry is attempted. Even W. H. Auden found himself stumped by it at first, although he came, like T. S. Eliot, to be a great admirer of Williams’s work.
Even Williams’s essays (I was going to say “straightforward essays,” but they aren’t) set one to tugging one’s beard. Here, by way of illustrating the point—and this is typical—are the first two sentences of Williams’s short church history, The Descent of the Dove: “The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metaphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two Heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete.”
Where are we with this sort of vocabulary and syntax? We are in Williams territory, that’s where we are. For everyone’s consolation, it may be said that it is not only beginning readers of Williams who find themselves stumped. I myself wrote a doctoral thesis on Williams 35 years ago, and to this day I cannot pick up a single one of his books without at some point muttering to myself, “Yo! Williams, old boy—how on earth do you expect anyone to have the faintest clue as to what you are on about here?”
The thing is, Williams unfailingly leads us all on what George Eliot called “a severe mental scamper.” His mind was so packed with images, and so curious about every cranny of the universe, and so regaled by ideas—especially dogma—and so overcharged with what one can only call high-voltage restlessness, that it is a wonder his prose is accessible at all. Ironically, we find that we must give him a palm for clarity. His prose—and, it must be said, his poetry—says precisely what he means.
He means nothing more, and nothing less, than what we find on the page. And, as endless critics, with Eliot in the van, have pointed out over and over, every poetic line must be just as we find it. The disjuncture between words—both the vocabulary and the word order—and meaning has been closed by the poet. And we may, with a certain justice, call Williams a poet, even though most of what he wrote appears on the page as “prose.” The thing is, everything that he writes has the density, economy, pace, and exactitude, of poetry.
Good or Great?
But what about Williams? Was he a good novelist (he wrote seven)? Poet (he wrote two slender volumes that make up an Arthurian cycle of lyrics)? Critic (endless articles)? Dramatist (several plays)? Theologian? Ah. It is this last category that interests us here. But let it be said about the other four categories that Williams’s work is problematical. It may be great. After 45 years of reading his stuff, I am still turning that question over in my mind.
Certainly he leads us all out into titanic vistas, and startles us over and over and over by pointing out features in that vista which to him are obvious, but which in a thousand years we might never have noticed. Like all good poets, he sees the fear in a handful of dust. Or shall we say, the glory in a handful of dust (Eliot meant that anyway). But what checks us, every time we approach the point of concluding that Williams is one of the greats, is his—what is the word? Quirkiness.
Thomas Howard taught for many years at St. John's Seminary College, the Roman Catholic seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. Among his many works are the books Christ the Tiger, Evangelical Is Not Enough, Lead Kindly Light, On Being Catholic, and The Secret of New York Revealed, and a videotape series of 13 lectures on "The Treasures of Catholicism" (all from Ignatius Press).
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
32.6—November/December 2019
An Open Letter to Christian Readers of Jordan Peterson & Roger Scruton by James Bryson
27.5—Sept/Oct 2014
on Growing Vegetables as a Primer in Moral Philosophy by Rachel Lu
28.3—May/June 2015
Whittaker Chambers's Lonely War Against Godless Collectivism by Hunter Baker
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
