Jonathan Walker on Charles Williams’ Supernatural Thrillers

This is a guest post by Jonathan Walker, whose latest novel, The Angels of L19, is published this month by Weatherglass Books

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Charles Williams was a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and, like them, a member of the legendary Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. Gervel Lindop’s recent biography of Williams therefore refers to him as the ‘Third Inking’, while Sørina Higgins’s blog, dedicated to his life and work, calls him ‘The Oddest Inkling’. Exactly how odd is something revealed in detail by Lindop’s biography, which I strongly recommend. Williams had a reputation for saintliness in his own lifetime, but much of his private life was more complicated than that reputation suggests, and modern fundamentalists attracted by his association with the Inklings might find his interest in magic and hermeticism disconcerting.

Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, Williams was not an academic, and attended the Inklings’ meetings for the most part only as a visitor to Oxford. His background was also quite different to theirs: he was from a lower middle-class family whose financial difficulties meant he had to drop out of the University of London after a year and take a menial job in the printing industry, though he managed to rise and become an editor at the London offices of the Oxford University Press. He was also a teacher – but he lectured in what would now be called FE: night-school classes for adult learners. (Only towards the end of his life, when the OUP had moved its offices back to Oxford during the war, did he give a series of lectures on Milton at the university, arranged by Lewis and Tolkien).

Williams wrote works of popular history for OUP, as well as poetry often inspired by Arthurian myth. But his novels, ‘supernatural thrillers’ published by T.S. Eliot at Faber, were his greatest success. The Eliot connection suggests the range of Williams’s interests: unlike Lewis and Tolkien, he was not hostile to literary modernism per se.

Though Williams is now relatively obscure – at least compared to his more famous friends – his novels pioneered a third model for fantasy writers to complement those of alternate, secondary worlds (Tolkien) or portal fantasies (Lewis). Lewis himself explains how this third model worked in a short talk he gave on Williams’s novels. These books, he said, mix:

what some people call the realistic, and the fantastic. I’d rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs. On the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. … [T]his is not a mixture of two literary kinds. … Williams is really writing a third kind of book, … in which we begin by saying, ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were … invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’

In a portal fantasy like Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, characters from our world enter another through a magical gateway such as Professor Kirke’s wardrobe. In Williams’s stories, by contrast, representatives from other realities enters ours. In some respects his stories therefore resemble weird fiction, which is also preoccupied with the terrifying consequences of a ‘violation of frontier’. Except that for Williams these intrusions were not really violations at all. As Eliot wrote in his introduction to Williams’s final novel, All Hallows’ Eve, ‘For [him] there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. …. To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural’.

I confess that my interest in Williams is really only in his last two (and best) novels, Descent into Hell (1937), and the posthumously published All Hallows’ Eve (1945): I haven’t read any of the others, and the poetry does not appeal to me at all. But these two books are quite remarkable – not least for what they do with the idea of hell and the afterlife.

Williams is undoubtedly an odd stylist: his sentences are often crabbed and convoluted, not helped by his habit of inventing neologisms for religious or theological concepts in an attempt to avoid triggering preconceptions or taking sides in pre-existing doctrinal controversies. But he can also be a writer of great power, peculiarly alive to the far-reaching consequences of seemingly small moral choices.

In Descent into Hell, the titular journey is embarked upon by a historian, Lawrence Wentworth, who runs a discussion group for young people in his village. His downfall begins with his inability to accept that Adela, a woman from that group, has no romantic interest in him. Wentworth therefore welcomes the attentions of a succubus, a spirit form of Adela, who promises to submit to his every whim. For a fantasy writer, Williams here is peculiarly hostile to fantasy, at least when it takes the form of a denial of reality – worse, a denial of Kant’s moral imperative, the recognition that others have their own autonomy and desires independent of our own.

At the same time, Wentworth is also unable to admit to a professional error – the wound to his amour propre is too great for him to bear – and both these choices seal his fate. The hell that he enters, while still alive, is one where, having refused to accept his real relations to others and his obligations to the professional community to which he belongs, he is left alone. But not merely alone. Language is necessarily social: to speak implies an interlocutor. Without the willingness to fully imagine such an interlocutor, language itself collapses, and beyond that, even the possibility of associating things in meaningful patterns.

It is a hell of solipsism. The following passage comes from the extraordinary final paragraphs of the novel:

Then everything at which he was looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing together, because in this place they drew towards each other from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it, and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them, but somewhere at some time he had thought he knew similar forms and they had had names. … There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void.

Wentworth is a living character who enters hell prematurely. Descent into Hell also features a dead character – a ghost, in effect – a wretched suicide who lingers around the site of his death in a kind of grey limbo. Near but not in the living world, he is as alone as he felt in life. But not as alone as Wentworth, since he is still able to perceive – to receive – the attention of a sympathetic woman, herself close to death, who reaches out to him.

This kind of provisional limbo state also appears in All Hallows’ Eve, and it suggests Williams’s willingness to depart from Christian orthodoxy. In traditional Christian thought, death offers a kind of terminal end point beyond which moral choice is not possible. One’s eternal fate is fixed at the moment before death. (Even if one believes in purgatory, this does not change one’s ultimate fate: everyone in purgatory will ultimately attain heaven; no one in hell will).

In these two novels, by contrast, not only is hell a place to which you condemn yourself and can enter before you die, but – for those who retain some attachment to life even after their death – moral choice is still possible. Ghosts are, in effect, invited to reconsider the meaning of their life: now that it is over, with what in their earthy existence do they wish to identify themselves? And what do they wish to transcend? Do they wish to relive and reaffirm their most selfish impulses? Or do they want to search within their histories for flickers of generosity and love, however small and faltering these might be? And they can be very small indeed: the redemption of one of Williams’ ghostly characters begins with her remembering her husband getting up in the night to fetch her a glass of water.

Williams’s novels are full of more obvious and dramatic supernatural elements: the succubus, a doppelganger, a sinister cult leader bent on world domination, the Holy Grail, a magical Tarot deck – but for me the most powerful aspect of his fantasy is the way it magnifies the consequences of seemingly small and ordinary choices we make in our earthly lives and assigns to them a cosmic and eternal significance.

Jonathan Walker grew up in Liverpool, but has lived in Glasgow, Cambridge, Swansea, Canterbury, Venice, Sydney and Melbourne. He is the author of a biography of a seventeenth-century Venetian spy, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, and a fantasy novel set in an alternate version of Venice, Five Wounds. His latest novel is a work of weird fiction set in 1980s Liverpool: The Angels of L19, published by Weatherglass Books. He has doctorates in history and creative writing.